The fluctuating climates, rising human population, and deteriorating arable lands necessitate sustainable crops to fulfil global food requirements. In the countryside, legumes with intriguing but enigmatic nitrogen-fixing abilities and thriving in harsh climatic conditions promise future food security. However, breaking the yield plateau and achieving higher genetic gain are the unsolved problems of legume improvement. Present study gives emphasis on 15 important legume crops, i.e., chickpea, pigeonpea, soybean, groundnut, lentil, common bean, faba bean, cowpea, lupin, pea, green gram, back gram, horse gram, moth bean, rice bean, and some forage legumes. We have given an overview of the world and India’s area, production, and productivity trends for all legume crops from 1961 to 2020. Our review article investigates the importance of gene pools and wild relatives in broadening the genetic base of legumes through pre-breeding and alien gene introgression. We have also discussed the importance of integrating genomics, phenomics, speed breeding, genetic engineering and genome editing tools in legume improvement programmes. Overall, legume breeding may undergo a paradigm shift once genomics and conventional breeding are integrated in the near future.

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Being a model crop as well as a staple food crop, rice possesses a conspicuous position in plant sciences. Doubled haploid (DH) breeding in rice offers multiple advantages over conventional methods via accelerating the process of pure lines development. For ages, several methods have been devised for haploid production in rice. In vitro‐based methods have demonstrated their potential in DH production, but these methods are further impeded by stringent requirements and restricted to few species. Further, unlike maize, the in vivo DH breeding technology is still impractical in rice. Recent findings of the key molecular players behind the haploid induction (HI) trait in maize and rice have shown their potential in rice improvement programmes. In this review, we have discussed different strategies of HI in rice particularly focusing on recent progress made for developing haploid inducer stock (HIS) by employing both conventional and modern approaches. It also focuses on future implications of HIS so that it can be incorporated in the pipeline of modernized rice breeding.