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Not AvailableFinger millet also known as Ragi or African millet is an annual plant widely grown as an important food crop in the arid areas of Africa and south Asia. It ranks third in importance among the millets after sorghum and Pearl millet in India. Finger millet is rich in nutritional qualities with good quality protein, plentiful minerals, dietary fibres, phytochemicals and vitamins. It is the richest source of calcium providing 8-10 times more than that of rice and wheat. Finger millet is essentially a self-pollinated crop. Being a food grain crop, yield improvement is the major goal in varietal improvement. Characterization and evaluation of germplasm thus becomes important to identify the genotypes with novel traits and to break the yield plateau. In this context, the present investigation was carried out at Centre on Rabi sorghum (ICAR-IIMR), Solapur during kharif-2017 to evaluate 38 Finger millet germplasm lines. Trial was conducted in RCBD with two replications. ANOVA revealed there is a significant difference between the lines. The accession no. 5117 showed highest number of fingers/plant (59), 5114 with highest no. of productive tillers/plant (36) and finger length (17.5g), 5141 with highest panicle weight (180g). Most of the lines were of non-pigmented type except line no. 5146. Similarly most of the lines exhibited lodging character except line nos. 5121 and 5122 despite being tall. Some of the lines viz., 5141, 5140 and 5107 showed good grain and fodder yield/plant. The selected lines can be successfully utilized as donors in hybridization for better realization of superior transgressive segregants.ICA