Bacteriological Contamination

This report by the Water and Sanitation Management Organization (WASMO) presents the impact of the Water Quality Monitoring and Surveillance (WQM&S) Programme implemented in Gujarat, which focused on community involvement in assessing and evaluating water quality.

It has been found that waterborne diseases due to contaminated drinking water are rampant in the state of Gujarat along with chronic illnesses associated with the presence of chemical contaminants in the drinking water. Community involvement in managing water quality has been identified as an important step to deal with this situation. Read More

Water quality of the Ganga as it passes through various states is presented in this document. The data has been collected over a period of many years from 39 water quality monitoring stations along the main river and 102 stations on its tributaries which were setup in 2008/09.

The study focuses on the parameters for dissolved oxygen, (DO), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and faecal coliforms (FC) as these indicate the biological health of the river. The period of study for the river Ganga is 1999-2008. The study finds that most of the water quality parameters studied do not meet the standards.Read More

This paper by A Jagadeesh of RMK Engineering College, describes the design and testing of a portable, low-cost, and low maintenance solar disinfection unit, that can provide potable water. This system was tested with bore water, well as well as with waste water. In 5 hours, the unit eradicated 99.99% of the bacteria contained in the water samples.Read More

This unit can provide about 6 liters of pure drinking water and larger units can be fabricated for providing safe drinking water at a community level.

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.