Abstract:
In most of the Indian cities, around half of the urban water requirement is fulfilled by
groundwater. Recently, seasonal urban droughts have been frequently witnessed globally, which adds
more stress to groundwater systems. Excessive pumping and increasing demands in several Indian
cities impose a high risk of running out of groundwater storage, which could potentially affect
millions of lives in the future. In this paper, groundwater level changes have been comprehensively
assessed for seven densely populated and rapidly growing secondary cities across India. Several
statistical analyses were performed to detect the trends and non-stationarity in the groundwater
level (GWL). Also, the influence of rainfall and land use/land cover changes (LULC) on the GWL
was explored. The results suggest that overall, the groundwater level was found to vary between
±10 cm/year in the majority of the wells. Further, the non-stationarity analysis revealed a high impact
of rainfall and LULC due to climate variability and anthropogenic activities respectively on the GWL
change dynamics. Statistical correlation analysis showed evidence supporting that climate variability
could potentially be a major component affecting the rainfall and groundwater recharge relationship.
Additionally, from the LULC analysis, a decrease in the green cover area (R = 0.93) was found to have
a higher correlation with decreasing groundwater level than that of urban area growth across seven
rapidly developing cities.
