As part of its committment to provide safe drinking water to its rural communities, the Karnataka State Government as part of its World Bank-assisted Jal Nirmal Yojana program, implemented through the Karnataka Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Agency, took an initiative to adopt a Geographical Information System (GIS) approach to develop a Spatial Information and Knowledge base on groundwater quality of Karnataka.
As part of this effort, a comprehensive study of the quality of groundwater being supplied in rural areas has been taken up and water quality mapping, building of GIS database and profiles have been generated for 27 districts and 175 taluks. For this the chemical analytical data of water samples collected from bore wells in different villages by the Rural Development and Engineering Department (RDED) have been used. In all about 1,54,491 groundwater samples have been collected and analysed for 14 major parameters covering 33,647 villages out of the total 56,682 villages in the state.
This section contains individual district-wise profile files. Each district profile contains district and taluk level information across various study parameters, followed by representation of the analysis of the data through district level GIS maps.
All the district profiles can be downloaded as one single file below.
We acknowledge the support of S Vishwanath (Rainwater Club Bangalore) and Anand Kumar Naidu (Bangalore) in making this publication available on India Water Portal.
This article sheds light on some of the unusual, but fascinating water conservation practices of Malnad region in Karnataka. The Malnad region is home to hundreds of stories on water harvesting with each one being different and more interesting than the other. 
