Single early counts of radicle emergence (RE) is a validated test for four crop species. We performed this study to assay whether an early radicle emergence (RE) count predicts the emergence of seedlings in Desi chickpea seed lots as well as electrical conductivity test. Electrical conductivity (EC) measurements of 11 seed lots were highly predictive of field emergence (FE) (R 2 =0.626**). The radicle emergence was counted at regular time intervals of 6 hours, up to 72 h after imbibition. Mean germination time (MGT) clearly predicted variation in the produced seedlings in the field. This evidence supports the idea that the variation in the germination time between seed lots can be an early indicator of seed vigour. Early radicle emergence counts at 48 hours had also a high coefficient of determination (R² = 0.764 ***) with FE. The negative correlation was between electrical conductivity and the single early count of RE at different germination times indicating that the two tests identified the same differences in vigour. The strong relationship between RE at 48 hours with both electrical conductivity and FE supports the proposal that a single count of radicle emergence could be an alternative vigour test for Desi chickpea.

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