II-8-Ground Water Vulnerability Assessment for Roorkee Town.

Abstract

In the present paper, groundwater vulnerability of alluvial aquifers of Roorkee town, District Haridwar, Uttarakhand State has been evaluated. For this purpose relevant data of the shallow unconfined aquifers was collected for three years from 2004 to 2006 by establishing a groundwater monitoring network of 30 shallow wells and hand pumps in the areas. The study has revealed that though the physico-chemical quality of the shallow ground water is generally within permissible ranges for drinking, the concentration of some heavy metals like cadmium and chromium is higher in a few ground water samples. Besides, values of ambient faecal coliforms were also found to be high at a number of locations especially in premonsoon samples indicating bacteriological pollution of shallow ground water particularly towards the northwestern and southeastern parts of the study area. Based on the relevant hydrogeological parameters like depth to water table, net recharge, soil and aquifer media, alongwith topography and nature of vadose zone, the ground water vulnerability of the study area has been worked out using the well known DRASTIC method. This indicates possibilities of groundwater pollution at Rampur-Saliar in the northwestern part of the area. A comparison of the DRASTIC indices and quality parameters indicates that the level of groundwater contamination decreases towards east and (southeast) barring a few parameters like cadmium and faecal coliforms which show random variation depending on the localized waste disposal practices.