Context: The Svalbard Global Seed Vault referred to as the earth’s doomsday vault now contains about 1.05 million seeds.
About Svalbard Global Seed Vault

• It is the world’s largest secure seed bank located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago.
• The aim of the vault is to preserve a vast variety of crop seeds in the case of a doomsday event, calamity, climate change or national emergency.
• It is owned and administered by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food on behalf of the Kingdom of Norway.
• In April 2014, India made its first seed deposit to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault with one box of 25 accessions of pigeon pea.
• The seeds can be of use in the event of a global catastrophe or when some species is lost due to natural disasters. It is therefore also referred to as the doomsday vault.
• The storage rooms are kept at −18 °C (−0.4 °F). The low temperature and limited access to oxygen will ensure low metabolic activity and delay seed aging.
• The samples stored in the genebanks are accessible in accordance with the terms and conditions of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, approved by 118 countries or parties.

India’s Seed Bank:

• India has also established its own seed storage facility at Chang La in Ladakh,
• It was built jointly by the Defence Institute of High Altitude Research (DIHAR) and the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (NBPGR) in 2010 under the aegis of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).
• It stores over 5,000 seed accessions (one accession consists of a set of seeds of a particular species collected from different geographical and demographic locations).
• When a seed needs to be stored for few years, maintaining it at just 10 degree Celsius is enough.But in the long run, for 10 to 20 years, they need to be kept at a minus 15 to minus 20 degree Celsius (range).Chang La has a prevalent temperature in this sub-zero range.