Abstract:
Drought is a natural disastrous phenomenon that occurs due to the continuous
reduction of rainfall over a short or a long period of time. A deficit in
precipitation result in deficit of groundwater recharge, which leads to lower
groundwater table and turn in groundwater drought. This is a challenging
problem in Bundelkhand region of the Central India, where people mostly
suffer from groundwater drought condition. Bearma basin is one of the
considerable groundwater resource fields of Bundelkhand in Madhya
Pradesh, which is Sub-basin of Ken River. In the present study the Bearma
basin has been selected with the objective to analyze the groundwater drought
condition in Damoh district by using Groundwater Drought Index (GDI). The
26 years (1984-2010) quarterly ground water levels of 59 observation wells
falling in and around of Damoh district has been used. The GDI for all
observation wells were computed with the help of ground water level of each
stations. With the help of temporal variations of GDI for each observation
wells, the groundwater drought characteristics of the basin falling under
Damoh district were analyzed. Result showed that the maximum number of 9
frequency drought events occurred at Fatehpur, Hatta and Bari-kalan with
total durations varying between 83 to 134 months and total severity varying
between -19.40 to -27.96. The cumulative groundwater drought duration of
134 months has been observed at Devron followed by 116 months at Kusumi.
The overall drought intensity in the observation wells was found -0.38.
