Water Quality Around
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted daily activities across multiple sectors globally. The extent of its impact on the global economy and its key sectors, especially water, wastewater, and associated sectors such as agriculture, is still unclear.But the 21-day lockdown announced by PM Modi seems to have had a positive impact on rivers in the country. With industrial units shut, river water has been clean since the lockdown. You can actually see through the water. This has what we’ve achieved, albeit due to a forced lockdown. In fact, the water quality of two of the major rivers of India The Ganges and the Yamuna has improved.
It is found that, among the 36 real-time monitoring stations of river Ganga, water from 27 stations met the permissible limit. This improvement of water quality at Haridwar and Rishikesh was ascribed to the sudden drop of the number of visitors and 500% reduction of sewage and industrial effluents. According to the real-time water quality monitoring data of the Uttarakhand Pollution Control Board (UPCB, 2020) of India, physicochemical parameters i.e, pH (7.4–7.8), dissolved oxygen, biochemical oxygen demand and total coliform of the river Ganga was found within the surface water quality standard of India.Except total coliform in some monitoring stations, all others parameters even meet the national drinking water quality standard, which can be used without conventional treatment but after disinfection.It is also found that, the concentration of pH, electric conductivity (EC), DO, BOD and chemical oxygen demand (COD) has reduced almost 1–10%, 33–66%, 45–90%, and 33–82% respectively in different monitoring stations during the lockdown in comparison to the pre-lockdown period.Moreover, due to imposed a ban of public gathering, number of tourists and water activities were reduced in many places and this also helped in improvement of the water quality in India.