Water Criteria Evaluation for Drinking Purposes in Mahanadi River Basin, Odisha

Abstract

Water is a vital, finite resource whose quantity and quality are deteriorating as the world population increases. For agriculture, industry, and the needs of people and wildlife, rivers are essential. Weighted Arithmetic (WA) Water Quality Index (WQI), Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME) WQI, and multivariate approaches are used in this work to examine the quality of the surface water in the Mahanadi Basin, Odisha, for the 2019–2022 timeframe. All physical-chemical parameter findings were compared to the ranges or values specified by WHO guidelines. The geographic distribution maps were created in ArcGIS 10.5 using the Inverted Distance Weighted (IDW) interpolation method to understand the changing behavior of parameters in surface water. For effective management of surface water quality, multivariate techniques like Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Cluster Analysis (CA) were used to evaluate the water conditions. The findings show that 10.53 % (CCME WQI) and 15.8 % (WA WQI) of the samples depict extremely poor and poor water quality. Twenty surface water metrics and 19 sampling locations consist of three major clusters with related surface water properties, were investigated using dendrogram plots, for identification of elemental associations. The PCA creates the five primary components, which strongly influence the hydro-chemistry of river water by 93.915%. The results of the combined analysis of the two–water quality (WQ) indices with GIS, CA, and PCA indicate that the majority of the samples come from the areas ST–8 (Cuttack D/s), ST–9 (Paradeep), and ST–19 (Choudwar D/s) and are categorized as poor to extremely poor. Numerous human-made activities, organic waste, as well as the outflow of sewage wastewater, were shown to be the principal reasons for the deterioration in water quality. According to the current study, surface water in the region with poor water quality needs to be treated before being consumed. This study provides insight into fundamental processes that are significant for the sustainable management of surface water resources.