Abstract:Drought, in addition to adverse climatic change, is a primary driver of yield loss in essential grain crops. An essential plant breeding goal and the goal of this experiment was to develop drought-tolerant post-rainy season sorghum lines for higher yield under both well-water and water stress situations. Drought stress indices are one of the methods for identifying and selecting superior genotypes that are stable, high-yielding, and drought tolerant. The Plant Abiotic Stress Index Calculator (iPASTIC), an online software that calculates common stress tolerance and susceptibility indices for various crop traits, was used to find superior genotypes using tolerance index (TOL), mean productivity (MP), harmonic mean (HM), yield stability index (YSI), geometric mean productivity (GMP), stress susceptibility index (SSI), stress tolerance index (STI), relative stress index (RSI), and yield index (YI). In this work, 45 Near isogenic lines (NILs) from crosses (SPV86 × E36-1, SPV570 × E36-1 and M35-1 × E36-1) were screened with the nine drought stress indices and all genotypes were differentiated under well-water and water stress conditions. NILs 34, 21, 44, 7 and 9 were identified as the top five superior high yielding and drought tolerant genotypes based on these indices, correlation and principal component analysis. These improved genotypes can be used in further field evaluation and advanced breeding efforts to generate drought-tolerant cultivars.