Rice bean, Vigna umbellata (Thunb.) Ohwi & Ohashi, a native of southeast Asia (Burkill, 1935), is grown in India chiefly by the natives of the eastern and northeastern region (Watt, 1971). Since there is an enormous variability in this tribal pulse, a concentrated effort was made to explore the area. A brief note on the material collected and studied is presented. Through explorations conducted from 1970 onwards, about 300 collections have been made from the tribal-dominated mountainous tracts of eastern (Bihar, Orissa) and northeastern (Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram) India, where this crop is grown in fields under shifting cultivation with other crops like maize and millets, or as a kitchen garden crop in courtyards. The material collected was mainly vine types, and only a few semibushy types could be located in Cherrapunji (Meghalaya) and Ukhrul (Manipur). Morphologically, all these belong to rombiya types (Burkill, 1935), and have hairy plant parts-stem, leaves, peduncles, pedicels, and pods. Considerable variation was noted in pod length (8-12 cm), grain size (Fig. 1, 2) and colour. Both uniformly coloured and speckled grains occurred in the collections. Of these, black and cream-coloured in the former, dark greenish in the latter mottled grain type, were the more common. Two rare collections from Mao hills, Manipur, presented unusual green grain types. In general, in grain colour variation, green mottled and cream-coloured beans were more common. These collections (272) were evaluated at New Delhi from 1970-1979, and were scored for the number of days taken to flower, node of first pod formation, pod length (cm), seeds per pod, number of pods per peduncle, days taken to maturity and 100 grain weight (g). For pod length and seeds per pod, 10 fully developed pods on each plant at different nodes were measured and seeds counted. Average values for each character were used for the mean and coefficient of variation. Data on the whole region are given in Table 1, exhibiting the range of variation for the 7 characters studied. It was observed that: