Executive Summary : | Point and diffuse source water pollution is a major environmental concern in India affecting more than 37.7 million Indians and putting an estimated economic burden of over $600 million a year. Despite significant local efforts to reduce pollution sources from both urban (e.g. wastewater treatment plant discharges and combined sewer overflows) and rural (e.g.nutrient and agrochemical runoff) areas, there remains a lack of understanding of the production and transfer of waste and associated pollutants from different land uses to surface waters and reservoirs. This study is located in the Damodar river basin in West Bengal and Jharkhand states. Land use is mainly forest and rainfed and irrigated agricultural, although it is also home to large-scale mining and industrial activities. The river basin includes four major dams (Tilaiya, Konar, Panchet and Maithon) and many smaller dams and barrages. Reservoir siltation due to upstream soil erosion and domestic/industrial waste discharges in Damodar river is an on-going issues, estimated at 1.12 Mm3/year in the Konar reservoir (Kumar et al., 2015), leading to dead storage of 43% and 31% in the Maithan and Panchet reservoirs. Heavy metals in river water samples of up to 188.7 ?g L-1Pb, 65.1 ?g L-1Mn, 1452 ?g L-1 Fe and 4 ?g L-1 Cd (Banerjee and Gupta, 2011) and coliform bacteria at up to 20,000 colony-forming unit/100 ml (Chatterjee et al., 2010) have been reported, due to mine wastes, wastewater from thermal power stations, industrial discharges and urban pollution.
This research addresses these strategic research gaps by integrating comprehensive Spatio-temporal sampling of water and sediment quality with state-of-the-art integrated catchment-river-reservoir models so as to (1) improve understanding of the transport, transformation, interactions and fate of pollutants, (2) evaluate how land-use and rainfall patterns influence water quality and (3) aid understanding and management of water quality to support the needs of end-users and national, state and local-level policymakers and regulators. The anticipated deliverables broadly include (1) Mass balance analysis of water, sediment, nutrients and heavy metals within the reservoir systems identifying the temporal importance of reservoirs as source or sink for different constituents; (2) Real-time reservoir water quality monitoring system that reduces the time and cost involved in data collection, measurement and analysis, 3) Prototype water quality alert system for reservoir managers; (4) Development of a GIS database of point pollutant sources, land use and catchment indices for use by relevant stakeholders and governmental organizations; (5) A multi-criteria approach-based decision tool to improve the cost-effectiveness of BMPs. |
Co-PI: | Dr Damodhara Rao Mailapalli, Associate Professor, Dr Somsubhra Chakraborty, Assistant Professor, Dr Renji Remesan, Assistant Professor, Dr Ashok Mishra, Professor, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur |
