Genetic diversity among 71 red rice genotypes was worked out using Mahalanobis D2 statistic. On the basis of genetic distance, these genotypes were grouped into 10 clusters. Cluster X was the largest, consisting of 20 genotypes, while clusters I, II, III, IV and IX contained two genotypes each. There was no parallelism between genetic diversity and geographical distribution. Among the different characters studied, plant height, panicle length and grain yield contributed significantly for the genetic diversity. The maximum inter cluster distance (38.09) was highest between Cluster II and cluster V. The genotypes (Dodiga, Sharavathi, Akkalu, Bettasali, IRLON/90/39 and KHRS- 17) from these clusters may be used as potential donors for future hybridization programme to develop higher grain yield with red kernel type.