Rice is a high calorie, staple food for 60 percent of the world’s population. Asia produces about 90 percent of global rice.

"The decade of 1960 saw the green revolution of rice, resulting in the introduction of the high-yielding dwarf varieties. These dwarf rice hybrids soon became popular and replaced the traditional tall varieties, in spite of the fact that these dwarf cultivars required intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides, thus increasing the cost of cultivation significantly. Through the decades, extensive use of fertilizer and pesticides, have resulted in significant deterioration of soil and environment. However, as the current global population is reaching the 10 billion mark, the need for even higher rice production looms across Asia and other parts of the world. The present challenge in rice cultivation is two-fold. First- to increase the production, and second- to promote sustainable cultivation practices to safeguard the fragile ecosystem." In this piece of work, a rice seed dressing approach has been proposed, which is based on recent findings on a wide variety of dicot plants viz., nano pyrite (FeS2) seed dressing

Experimental design: A comparison of nano iron pyrite with fertiliser 

Crop images in four conditions

Proposed scientific mechanism for action of nanoparticles

©Das, C.K., Jangir, H., Kumar, J. et al. Nano-pyrite seed dressing: a sustainable design for NPK equivalent rice production. Nanotechnol. Environ. Eng. 3, 14 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41204-018-0043-1