**5. Conclusions**

Underutilized fruit crops play an important role for their therapeutic properties due to their significant medicinal and nutritional value and can be considered as future horticultural assets to help nations assuring nutrition and food security, besides providing recreational, social and environmental significance. Being hardy and adapted locally, these species may serve the purpose of enhancing sustainable farm income under the harsh arid and semi-arid environments, such as waste lands (jharber, kair, pilu), marginal or saline soil and water conditions (ber, aonla, bael, karonda, etc.), rocky terrains (custard apple, timroo, jamun, etc.) and also in the backyard or kitchen gardening (karonda, custard apple, khejri, mulberry, etc.) and avenue plantation (tamarind, lasora, khirni, jamun, mulberry, khejri, etc.). Some fruit crops possess high significance in food processing industries (aonla, bael, karonda, tamarind, etc.). Their horticultural development is moving quite fast, and in the future, there will be greater technological adoption, extension and policy planning, both in traditional horticultural enterprises as well as in the commercial sectors. Special efforts are needed in terms of research and development of suitable specific packaging practices and of superior varieties. Considering the potential of the underutilized fruit crops, the emphasis shall be made to substantiate the efforts being made towards eradicating global malnutrition by their direct introduction in other arid and semi-arid regions of the world so as to achieve the goal of sustainable development (1 to 3) of the United Nations.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, V.S.M., P.K., J.S.G. and A.S.; methodology, V.S.M., C.R., N.K.M., J.S.G., A.S. and P.; writing—original draft preparation, V.S.M., J.S.G., N.K.M., A.S., P. and P.K.; visualization and illustration of Tables, J.S.G., P.K., C.R., A.S., Y.R., B.B. and P.; writing—review and editing, P.K., A.S., Y.R. and B.B.; draft finalization, A.S., P.K., Y.R. and B.B. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** There was no external funding involved in the study.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors thankfully acknowledge A.K. Singh, Principal Scientist, ICAR-Central Institute for Arid Horticulture, CHES, Godhra, Gujarat, for providing some of the pictures of fruit crops, and the Director, ICAR-NBPGR, New Delhi, ICAR-CAZRI, Jodhpur, for extending logistic support for conducting the study.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
