Contamination, Pollution and Quality

Had the opportunity to attend a recent worldwide gathering on the topic of youth and social entrepreneurship, which gave much food for thought. The event was the 5th Global YES Summit, entitled “ReWork The World”.  Details of the gathering are at www.reworktheworld.org . The message there  was that we need to do something radical in order to find productive work for the vast numbers of youth coming into the workforce especially in developing nations. The new jobs cannot be of the old variety, they need to be green, sustainable jobs. In other words, we need to ‘rework the world’.  The conference was based on the premise that these new jobs will come out of social entrepreneurship.

My house is about 20 years old and is located in R T Nagar in Bangalore. In 1990, I had got a borewell dug. The Borewell is about 150 feet deep and has been giving me excellent quality water until about 2 years ago when I started noticing muddy water. The water that is pumped to an overhead tank contains fine particles of mud which tends to settle down in the overhead tank.

The report presents the evaluation of water supply system of Kakinada town in Andhra Pradesh. The neglect of hydrology of a region, while undertaking planning and development works in an urban environment, has serious consequences, the most notable being non-availability of enough potable drinking water to citizens. Water budget studies can be undertaken with all the available records to improve the functioning of such systems and to identify additional alternate resources.

The report looks at groundwater quality and presents the results of the chemical analysis of groundwater samples from openwells & borewells of Belgaum district. The study broadly covers these aspects - (i) groundwater quality evaluation of the district (ii) identification of groundwater quality problems in various parts of district (iii) classification of groundwater, and (iv) application of DRASTIC model for assessing the vulnerability to groundwater pollution.

In the present study, surface and groundwater quality monitoring has been undertaken in parts of Udhampur district in Jammu and Kashmir in order to evaluate its quality for domestic and agricultural purposes. Water sources are polluted by four kinds of substances: traditional organic waste, waste generated from industrial processes, chemical agents of fertilizers & pesticides used for crop production and silt from degraded catchment.

The report attempts to analyze the shallow groundwater table and water quality data for about 20 years pertaining to the Krishna delta. The trend analysis of groundwater level data of shallow wells indicates that in the upper part of the delta, the groundwater table moved up during the period 1979 to 1999. This may be due to the dense canal network in the delta and increase in irrigated area over a period of time.

The report deals with the transportation behavior of lindane, a pesticide used commonly in the agricultural and public health sectors in India, through sandy and loamy soils. The contamination of groundwater by pesticides is a worldwide problem because of their tissue degradation and carcinogenic nature. They are bio-accumulative and relatively stable and therefore, require close monitoring.

The pesticides used for agricultural, forestry and domestic activities leach into the groundwater and therefore, it is very important to study their transportation behavior in different types of soil media.

The study deals with the distribution of heavy metals on sediments under different flow conditions in the river Hindon. The river is subjected to varying degree of pollution caused by numerous untreated waste outfalls of municipal and industrial effluents.

The report deals with development of reaeration coefficient for Indian condition using mathematical approach and field studies. Of the various constituents, which determine the quality of water, Dissolved Oxygen is the most important parameter indicating the health of a stream. There is a continual replenishment (reaeration) or utilization (deoxygenated) of Dissolved Oxygen due to inflow of waste load at different points in the stream. When a waste load is discharged into a flowing stream, it is mainly subjected to advection, dispersion and reaction kinetics. Waste Load Allocation (WLA) studies provide information to assist in making effective decisions on levels of treatment required for a source or sources of pollutant loads.