Abstract
Various methods are being sought to manage the insect pests by following the safe and environment friendly practices including the minimal and justified use of pesticides. Bio insecticides have a significant pest controlling capability. Additionally, being environment friendly and highly degradable, they have low persistency and residual effects. Neem based insecticides have significant pest controlling properties. However, their use is limited due to the instability of azadirachtin that requires its application at short intervals. Conversely, bacterial derived spinosad also used as an environmentally safe product. Present study was carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of two bio-insecticides the biosal 10EC and spinosad 240SC in comparison with three conventional insecticides the imidacloprid 25WP, endosulfan 35EC and profenofos 500EC against whitefly (Bemicia tabaci Genn.) on brinjal crop. All the three conventional insecticides were found effective against whitefly. The effectiveness trend was found as imidacloprid> endosulfan> profenophos i.e. 79, 67 and 65% respectively. Azadirachtin based biosal performed well with 58% reduction, whereas, spinosad was found least effective with 41% reduction in whitefly population. Higher yield of brinjal crop indicates the higher effectiveness of insecticides and vice versa
