Vol. 9, Issue 7, Part B (2025)

The journey of cotton crop from its wild species to a major commercial crop has been influenced by many years of human intelligence and creativity. As time went by, cotton production has shown continuous progress, but it is driven by exhaustive chemical inputs. An increase in income comes with a cost to our ecological health. The solution to this problem is the formulation of nano plant hormones or nutrients, which is characterised by a controlled release mechanism. Nanotechnology is emerging as the greatest imperative tool in recent agriculture and is predicted to become a driving economic force in the near future. The experiment was conducted at field of Department of Agricultural Botany, Post Graduation Institute, Dr. Panjabrao Deshmukh Krishi Vidyapeeth, Akola during 2022-2023 kharif season. Biochemical and yield contributing parameters conditioned by the foliar sprays of different concentrations of chitosan, IAA, and chitosan based indole acetic acid nanoparticles (i.e., auxin spray @ 25 ppm, chitosan spray @ 75 ppm) as referenced, and 25 mg l⁻¹ of auxin NPs sprayed once, 2.5 mg l⁻¹, 5 mg l⁻¹, 10 mg l⁻¹, 15 mg l⁻¹, 20 mg l⁻¹, and 25 mg l⁻¹ of chitosan based auxin NPs sprayed twice at different growth stages of cotton. Result showed that biochemical parameters, the chlorophyll content index treatment, T₆ (5 mg l⁻¹ of chitosan based IAA NPS sprayed twice), was found to be significantly superior to the control at 120 DAS, and also proline showed significantly superior results to the control at harvest in treatment T₆ (5 mg l⁻¹ of chitosan based IAA NP_S sprayed twice). For yield and yield-contributing parameters like number of bolls and seed cotton yield per plant, treatment T₆ (5 mg l⁻¹ chitosan-based IAA of NPS sprayed twice) was found to be significantly superior to the control (exception: sympodial branches were found to be maximum in treatment T₂ because of height).