Abstract

Ganga River water is very much stressed with the rapidly increasing population, climate change and water pollution that increase domestic, agricultural and industrial needs. This study assesses the surface water quality of the River Ganga in India, using NSFWQI, OIP and multivariate techniques. During the current study, water samples from Ganga River were collected for the assessment of 19 physico-chemical determinants from 20 sampling locations. Water quality indices (WQIs) is used to classify the overall impact of different variables of water. Multivariate techniques were utilized to assess the water conditions for productive management of fresh water quality. The WQI results showed that surface water quality varied at the selected sampling sites among medium and good categories. The PCA generates the 6 principle components which highly contributes (80.3%) in influencing the hydro-chemistry of river water. Agricultural waste runoff, untreated effluents and many other anthropogenic activities were identified as main contributor in decreasing the water quality of the River Ganga. To maintain and protect this fresh water resources against contamination, the usage of stringent policies and rules are expected to preserve fresh water resources for people in the future.

Highlights

  • Rivers are one of the significant resources of freshwater to the people for the use in many purposes

  • Water and light are two important components required for the development and growth of aquatic plants (Hazrati et al 2016), which makes essential to measure the intensity of light in any freshwater resources

  • The highest average value of light intensity (LI) was recorded during summer season (2674.1 ± 1172.18 μmol m−2 s−1 ), whereas lowest value was observed during winter season (1932.81 ± 671.78 μmol m−2 s−1)

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Summary

Introduction

Rivers are one of the significant resources of freshwater to the people for the use in many purposes. India with 18% of world’s population and 4% of world’s water resources availability, is a water stressed nation with 1588 m3 per capita per annum water supply. The Uttarakhand is water rich state of the country with 21% availability of surface water against inevitably increase in agriculture, industrial and domestic water needs (TERI 2017; Census of India 2011). The importance of Ganga River is for its sociocultural perspective, and for various livelihood and economic activities for the people living around the basin. The improvement in the river health is growing debate in India since last decade, mainly in terms of its quality and quantity (Matta and Uniyal 2017). The river is facing multi-dimensional issues like, flow disturbance, water pollution, climate

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