Impact of Land-Use Changes on Groundwater Quality from Sangamner Area, Maharashtra, India

Abstract

Groundwater is the earth’s largest freshwater resource. The land-use changes can affect the hydrologic entities and have a potential impact on the quality of groundwater directly or indirectly. In view of this, 20 groundwater samples from Sangamner area, 13 from irrigated area, and 7 from non-irrigated area were analyzed for September 2007 and September 2014. The physical and chemical parameters such as pH, electrical conductivity (EC), total dissolved solids (TDS), Ca2+, Mg2+, Na+, K+, Cl−, HCO3 −, SO4 2−, NO3 −, B, Fe and Mn were determined by standard methods. The changes in land-use were measured from remote sensing (RS) data with the help of geographical information system (GIS) software. Moreover, geostatistics techniques like Kriging method were used for the spatial estimation of selected parameters. It was found that most of the parameters showed higher values in the majority of the samples from irrigated area. Increased salinization has resulted into large scale non-agricultural area alteration to intensive agricultural area. The agricultural area was 44.27 % in 2007 and increased to 49.01 % in 2014. This land-use change in the study area has favored the establishment of agro-based industries, which are responsible for the deterioration of groundwater quality. Assessing the quality of groundwater is difficult due to spatio-temporal variability of multiple contaminants. Therefore, this contribution suggests a GIS and RS-based groundwater quality assessment for improved spatial estimation. Educating the farmers to adopt better farm management practices, proper selection of crops, controlled use of chemical fertilizers, suitable cropping pattern and proper disposal of industrial toxic materials have been suggested to decrease the problem of groundwater quality in the study area.