Assessment of Groundwater Based Public Drinking Water Supply System of Kamrup District, Assam, India using a Modified Water Quality Index

Abstract

This work aims to assess the Water Quality Index (WQI) of the groundwater-based public drinking water supply system of Kamrup District (Rural) of Assam, India. For assessing WQI, water samples have been collected, both raw water and treated water, from seventy-eight public drinking water supply projects over the district for comprehensive physicochemical analysis. The WQI was calculated based on the weightage derived from the literature survey and based on the doctors’ weightage. The derived WQI showed that the water quality falls from poor to very poor quality. However, the concentration of the water quality parameters except Iron, Fluoride, and Manganese are within the permissible limit in all the water supply projects. It shows that the WQI calculated based on the weightage derived, as stated above, is not displaying the actual water quality of the supplied water. As such, a modified method is proposed to calculate the WQI of the supplied water considering the permissible limit of the parameters in deriving the weightage for the parameters. The WQI values calculated using the modified method falls in the range of good water quality to poor water quality and shows the true water quality of the supplied water. The statistical analysis of the water quality parameters and WQI shows that the WQI has a very high correlation with Manganese with a coefficient of correlation value of 0.86, followed by 0.4 with Chloride and 0.34 with Fluoride.