The objective of this study is to correlate the genetic diversity among tea cultivars with drought tolerance/susceptibility on the basis of morphological, physiological and molecular markers. Twelve highly polymorphic inter simple sequence repeat primers targeting the tea dinucleotide repeats predominantly present in drought stressed transcripts were used to screen out the germplasms into two groups showing drought tolerance and susceptible characteristic with polymorphic information content of 0.3. A similarity index of 0.58 was observed among the cultivars. Morpho-physiological diversity among the cultivars was studied using eighteen morphological and two physiological markers. Correlation studies showed significant association between the ranks of the morpho-physiological distances and molecular genetic distances at P=0.05%. The dinucleotide repeats targeted along with morpho-physiological correlation can be used in tea breeding for drought tolerance as the markers are in sync with the long term field trials based on which the plants were classified for drought trait.
