This research paper investigates the extent of training effectiveness as perceived by the participant farmers of Nobojibon Program, a rehabilitation program for the disaster affected people of Bangladesh. The specific objectives of the study were to determine and describe the extent of effectiveness of Trainings as perceived by the participant farmers of Nobojibon Program and to explore the relationship between each of the selected characteristics of the trainees/farmers and effectiveness of training programs. Data for the study were collected by personal interviewing from 120 randomly selected farmers of six Unions of Kalapara Upazila of Patuakhali district during the period of March 01, 2015 to April 15, 2015. Here 60 male and 60 female farmers were purposively taken. Pearson’s product moment correlation co-efficient were computed to examine the relationship between the concerned variables. The effectiveness of training scores of the respondents ranged from 83 to 244 with an average being 163.66 and standard deviation 35.05. It was found that more than fifty percent (50.83) of the farmers had medium level of effectiveness of training compared to 27.5 percent of them having less effectiveness and 21.67 percent, high effectiveness. Out of ten independent variables, six of them, that is years of farm size, communication exposure, innovativeness, cosmopoliteness, economic motivation and commercialization had significant positive relationships with their effectiveness of training. Four independent variables i.e. age, education, annual family income and organizational participation had no significant relationship with their effectiveness of training.

Salinity stress is the major constraint in rice production. Selection for salinity tolerance genotypes of rice based on phenotypic performance alone is less reliable and will delay in progress in breeding. Recent advent of molecular markers, microsatellites or simple sequence repeats (SSRs) were used to find out salt tolerant rice genotypes. In this study three selected SSR markers viz. RM336, RM510 and RM3412 were used to screen the germplasm for salt tolerance. For genotyping rice germplasm, DNA was extracted from leaf samples using CTAB mini-prep method. The number of allele per locus was 10, with an average number of 10 per locus. The average gene diversity of overall SSR loci for the 25 genotypes was 0.8693, ranging from 0.8608 to 0.8768. The PIC values for 3 SSR markers varied from 0.8456 (RM336) to 0.8645 (RM510) with an average PIC of 0.8556. Unweighted Pair Group Method of Arithmetic Means (UPGMA) dendrogram, constructed from Nei's genetic distance produced three distinct clusters of 25 rice genotypes which is very much similar to Principal Component Analysis (PCA). It can be concluded that Jamai naru, Kajol shail, Hogla, Khak shail, Tal mugur, BINA dhan8 were salt tolerant compared to FL 478 because they showed a lower similarity value with FL 478. Marker RM510 showed the highest level of diversity due to high PIC value. This scientific information could be used for selection of suitable parents and development of salt tolerant rice varieties as well.

The study was carried out with an objective to evaluate the agronomic performance of 76 rice genotypes and to learn the variability, heritability and genetic advance of yield and its components. The genotypes differed significantly for all the characters viz., days to 50% flowering, days of maturity, number of tillers plant-1, number of effective tillers plant-1, plant height, panicle length, number of filled grain panicle-1, number of unfilled grain panicle-1, 1000-seed weight and yield plant-1. The phenotypic co-efficient of variation (PCV) were higher than genotypic co-efficient of variation (GCV) for all the characters studied indicating that they all interacted with the environment to some extent. All the characters studied in the present investigation expressed high heritability estimates ranging from 78.38 to 99.14 percent. High heritability values indicate that the characters under study are less influenced by environment in their expression. High heritability along with high genetic advance was noticed for the traits, number of filled grains panicle-1 and number of unfilled grains panicle-1. Other characters showed high heritability along with moderate or low genetic advance which can be improved by intermating superior genotypes of segregating population developed from combination breeding.