ASSESSMENT OF WATER QUALITY OF GOMTI RIVER USING WATER QUALITY INDEX AND GIS, IN LUCKNOW CITY, UTTAR PRADESH

Gomti River originates from Pilibhit district, U.P. It passes through the district of Kheri, Hardoi, Sitapur, Lucknow, Barabanki, Sultanpur, Jaunpur, and ultimately merges in Ganga. The world is facing problems with a wide variety of pollutants both inorganic and organic in nature. Healthy soil, clean water, and air are the souls of life. Often soil, water, and air are no longer clean and pure but pose human health risks. Gomti receives huge quantities of untreated sewage, agricultural runoff, brings a lot of pesticides, fertilizer, street washouts bringing oil, asphalt, sediment, and many types of heavy metals. From industrial effluents to domestic discharge, the river becomes more of a flowing dumping yard. After traveling about 240 km Gomti enters Lucknow, where it travels for 16 km. Its flow mainly depends upon the occurrence of rain and therefore the flow in the river is very lenient during the monsoon. The river collects large amounts of human and industrial pollutants as it flows through the highly populous areas (18 million approx.) of Uttar Pradesh. High pollution levels in the river have negative effects on the ecosystem of the Gomti threatening its aquatic life. Before reaching Lucknow Gomti receives waste from the sugar and distillery industries of Sitapur. All industries of the distillery, milk industry, and vegetable oil pouring effluent directly into Gomti, and besides this domestic wastewater are also discharged into the River Gomti. In this study, a Total of eight sampling sites were selected between Guaghat upstream and Piparaghat. Parameters like Temperature, Total suspended solids (TSS), Total dissolved solids (TDS), pH, Hardness, Dissolved oxygen (DO), Biochemical Oxygen Demand(BOD), Chemical Oxygen Demand(COD), Nitrate, Nitrite, Chlorine, Alkalinity, Calcium, Magnesium and some Heavy metals were determined. Changes in the water quality of River Gomti due to variations in the number of parameters were found. Heavy metals mainly Iron, Chromium, Copper, and Lead, Nickel were noticed. This study monitors groundwater quality, relating it to land use /land cover and habitation masks of different water quality parameters are prepared by using geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing techniques. The base map was prepared by Survey of India topo sheets on a 1:50.000 scale. The land use /land cover map was made from satellite imagery and GIS software like ARC GIS 9.3. The groundwater samples were collected from the selected locations and were analyzed for different Physico-chemical analyses and a water quality index was prepared. The water quality index (WQI) was then calculated on the basis of WHO standards to classify suitability for drinking water.