Effect of Developmental Activities on Water Quality in the Proximity of Deoghar Town in the Jharkhand State of India

Abstract

Deoghar, one of the oldest towns of the Jharkhand state, is with religious importance of high esteem. The place at present is highly congested and the population overgrowth has much exceeded the carrying capacity to push the prevailing infrastructure to the stage of critical derangement. The State as well as Central government has taken initiatives to launch infrastructure development programmes in and around the town. For addressing the issues of ecological solutions to the problems emanating from developmental activities, a fact finding survey was considered necessary by the present authors to evaluate the status of different variables pertaining to water and air factors of the environment in and around Deoghar. As such the present work was kept concerned with the assessment of the impact of developmental activities on water quality of the sites in question. Data reveal the fact that groundwater in the project area in general is soft, with the hardness level below the desirable limit of 300 mg/l., the samples being free from heavy metals like cadmium, arsenic, lead, chromium, etc. Groundwater samples drawn from tube wells were seen to remain free from fecal coliform and total coliform and hence potable and suitable for human consumption after treatment process. Surface water quality data revealed the samples from monitoring stations to be well within the standard prescribed by CPCB for Class B, Class D and Class E types of water for most of the parameters except for oil and grease. None of the heavy metals of interest are in unacceptably high concentration.