its drought tolerant nature in the following ways: (i) despitehaving a negative slope of RWC vs. SWP, it had a sharp increasein yield after stress during active tillering stage (Fig. 2G), (ii) it hada strong correlation between yield and SWP during active tiller-ing stressed plots (Table 3), (iii) it retained higher RWC than IR36and IR72 in active tillering stage (and flowering stage) during theincreased stress level in the 2012 growing season (Table 2). Hence,Vandana may be used as a potential variety for improving yield andincorporating it in drought improvement programmes to exploit itscapacity to recover from the active tillering stage stress.Swarna appeared to be a promising variety as it performed bet-ter than other drought susceptible varieties (IR36 and IR72) withrespect to physiological parameters. Unlike IR36 and IR72, Swarnamaintained an increasing trend in yield (Fig. 2J) with highly sig-nificant correlation between yield and SWP after stress in activetillering stage (Table 3). It maintained comparatively higher RWCand proline in all the growth stages, and maintained low electrolyteleakage after active tillering and flowering stage treatments com-pared to the other susceptible varieties (Table 2). This may be dueto its longer duration of growth (vegetative stage) and high prolinecontent (Hayano-Kanashiro et al., 2009) that led to better adapta-tion even after stress imposed in reproductive stages. Both Vandanaand Swarna displayed good osmotic adjustment in this experiment.Serraj and Sinclair (2002) referred osmotic adjustment as accumu-lation of solutes under drought, which helps in lowering waterpotential without decreasing actual water contents in the cellsand promoting roots’ ability to absorb more water (Blum, 2005).Osmotic adjustment might have helped maintain higher RWC dur-ing stress in the flowering stage of Vandana and Swarna. Improvedgrowth rate was also observed after vegetative stress by Lilley andFukai (1994c).