In addition to being climate-resilient, millets are highly nutritious and are valued for
their abundance in high-quality carbohydrates, proteins, micronutrients, and secondary
metabolites. The celebration of 2023 as the international year of millets has greatly
accelerated the awareness spread and consumption of millets. Ensuring an adequate supply of
better yielding, high-quality seeds to farmers is an arduous task on our part. Exploring
population diversity and characterizing possible donor genotypes for crop improvement are
the most crucial factors in breeding efforts for millets. Enhanced accessibility to germplasm
and faster use of it, will allow for considerable productivity gains in these crops and will also
make tiny millets competitive with other crops. High throughput phenotyping and genomic
technologies offer enormous potential for improving breeding methods and making better use
of induced and natural genetic variants found in wild relatives and germplasm collections.
For genetically improving millets, mutation breeding is being developed as a successful
supplemental strategy to traditional breeding techniques. Exploration of genetic and genomic
resources, covering applications of molecular marker technology, gene mapping, NGS based
genomics and modern breeding tools and genetic transformation, is integral part of millet
improvement programmes. Recent efforts to sequence these crops’ genomes and several
transcriptomics research have changed their reputation as "orphan crops", and the timing is
right to use this information for genomic and functional genomic applications. Numerous
genes that support biotic and abiotic stress tolerance in millets have been found which might
help enhance adaptation to semi-arid and dry environments. Comprehending the adaptive
processes and employing gene mining on millets may offer an opportunity to investigate
climate-resilience characteristics which can be even extended to other crops. Modern
molecular tools like genome editing offers immense possibilities of deploying biotic and
abiotic stress responsive gene(s) and nutrient pathway genes identified in millets for
developing desirable traits. This talk aims to address current developments in millets' genetic
enhancement as well as potential future directions and goals.