Water deficit and salt stresses possess serious threats for agricultural crops in terms of survival and sustainable food production.  Drought stress occurs when the available soil water gets reduced. Besides this, atmospheric condition may also cause excess loss of water by means of transpiration and evaporation. The general complexity underlying drought is often aggravated under conditions of erratic and unpredictable rainfall and by the occurrence of high temperature, high levels of solar radiation and poor soil characteristics. Breeding programme for obtaining drought tolerant varieties of mungbean needs deep knowledge of seedling growth characters. Keeping this view in mind, this present experiment was carried out to study the effect of drought stress on seedling growth of eighteen genotypes of mungbean and to rank them on the basis of their tolerance. The drought stress was imposed using a solution of polyethylene glycol PEG-6000 creating an osmotic potential of -1.5 MPa. A control set containing distilled water was also prepared for comparison with the treated ones. All the genotypes exhibited significant reduction in length and fresh weight of the seedling under drought stress in the present experiment. The genotypes also recorded significant decrease in total dry weight under drought stress. There was genotypic variation in respect of decrease. On the basis of relative performance of the genotypes under drought stress for seedling characters, four most tolerant (Pusa 1131, Meha, Pusa 9531 and NVL 638) and four most susceptible genotypes (Pusa 1172, IPM 9901-10, IPM 9901-6 and Pusa 1132) were identified. 

Key Words: Drought stress, Lipid peroxidation, Mungbean, Proline, Relative injury percentage, Relative leaf water content