Improving Institutional Responses to Groundwater Pollution: Use of a Drinking Water Quality Surveillance Index

Abstract

A comprehensive and scientific approach to water quality monitoring that can ensure the protection of drinking water sources from pollution is absent in India. This leads to ineffective and inefficient surveillance of drinking water quality. An attempt is made to develop a composite index, which would provide indications as to where the water supply surveillance—in relation to the quality of water—has to be more frequent to avert any public health hazards, and where regular monitoring of certain basic parameters would be sufficient. The index helps assess the public health risks associated with poor quality of water resources in an area. This composite index has three dimensions: threat, exposure, and vulnerability. The indices corresponding to these attributes have seven sub-indices in total, viz. (1) availability of drinking water resources in terms of quantity and quality; (2) accessibility of water; (3) infrastructure characteristics; (4) public health outcomes; (5) water quality index; (6) institutions and management index; and (7) climate, population density and flood proneness. The number of ‘minor’ factors which together are considered to have an influence on the measure of these sub-indices, the underlying assumptions, the methods for methods and procedure to compute, and the data sources are also discussed. The values of the index are computed for all the blocks of Maharashtra state, which face several issues with regard to monitoring of drinking water quality, and the variations are explained.