Abstract
The role of urban and periurban agriculture (UPA) activities plays an important position in reducing urban poverty, which is widely considered an alternate income with environmental sustainability, one of the Millennium Development Goals (MGDs) initiated by the United Nation in 2015. A study has been elucidated in UPA production systems in Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) on soil, irrigation water, and plant samples in four major areas to assess the quality of reused water in railway gardens (RG), balcony gardens (BG), terrace gardens (TG), and farms (F). The collected water samples from all the gardens were analyzed for nutrients, heavy metals, trace elements, and other contaminants. The RG area has utilized an amount of 98% wastewater in the overall irrigation of MMR. High load of heavy metal concentrations observed in irrigation water includes cadmium (Cd) and mercury (Hg) with ranges of 3 ppm and 5 ppb, respectively. Also, high levels of fecal coliforms (MPN < 1200) were detected in most of the samples. The quality assessment of irrigation water shows the majority of samples distributed in C1S1 category except one that belongs to C3S1 indicating a high salinity hazard. The Piper trilinear diagram indicates two possible types of water, including CaHCO 3 and Ca-Mg-Cl. The analyzed soil sample results reveal that the concentration of copper (Cu), chromium (Cr), nickel (Ni), strontium (Sr), cobalt (Co), and boron (B) exceeded the recommended maximum allowable concentration (MAC) and safety threshold standards by the various agencies. The values of the enrichment factor (EF) showed that Cd, Cu, and Cr were highly concentrated with an average value of 9.2, 5.9, and 9.3, respectively. A high amount of Sr concentration (156 mg kg − 1 ) was found in the leaves of white radish and also high B content (37.8 mg kg − 1 ) in spinach. The main finding of this work is that high level of heavy metal concentration in edible parts of vegetables is one of the direct toxicity in the human food chain in this area. Detailed investigations are needed to identify the sources, mobilization of heavy metals, and trace element contamination.
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