In December of 2015, when Chennai was flooded and people were marooned, a team of scientists from Anna University was collecting groundwater samples along the Adyar river to investigate if the groundwater in this region was fit for human consumption. 

The list of environmental problems that the world faces may be huge, but some strategies for solving them are remarkably small.

A group of Indian, Chinese, and Canadian scientists has developed transgenic rice that gives high yield even under severe water deficit. The new rice variety has been developed by transferring a gene from a common plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, into a variety of Indian rice called samba mahsuri.