Two hundred forty seven exotic collections were evaluated for forage yield and eleven other reiated characters. All the characters exhibited moderate to high variability. Plant height and days to flowering exhibited high heritability than other characters. All the 247 genotypes were grouped into 16 clusters with variable number of genotypes. Genotypes from different places of collection often grouped together in the same cluster, suggesting some degree of ancestral relationship between the genotypes. This suggested a lack of relationship between the genetic diversity and place of collection of genotypes. Based on genetic divergence and mean performance of yield and other characters, diverse and superior genotypes namely PI 497709, 486134, 497686, 486863, 497752, 497703, 497912, 497778, C1 9413, 9310, 9376, 9239, 8450, 9265, 8916, PA 2930, 2812, 2823, BGP 89, 58 were selected. Each of these genotypes is exceptionally good for one or more characters and was reasonable for other characters to those of the best check varieties. Therefore, these genotypes could be used to multiple crossing programmes to recover transgressive segregates, Based on cluster means, cluster III have. been identified for selecting parents to incorporate early maturity, cluster I for dwarfness, cluster IX for tillers, cluster XI for internode length, cluster XII for long leaf and flag leaf length and cluster IV for green and dry fodder yield. Further; on the basis of character association, it is argued that selection of plants with optimum plant height with more number of tillers and leaves per plant coupled with longer leaf length should result in progenies with high green fodder yield potential in fO'rage oat.
