Potable Water – The KGP Chronicle

AI to Detect How Safe is Your Drinking Water

Researchers from IIT Kharagpur have developed an AI-based prediction model for detecting Arsenic pollution in drinking water

Arsenic has been a menace in Eastern India especially along the banks of the Ganga for almost two decades now, putting millions of people at severe health risk. Researchers have been studying the distribution patterns of the contaminated groundwater for years to develop a large-scale ecological and environmental framework addressing this challenge in the region. For the first time, a breakthrough has been achieved. A group of researchers from IIT Kharagpur has successfully predicted the distribution of groundwater arsenic and human health risk in the affected areas using AI algorithms on environmental and geological and human usage parameters.

The researchers have delineated the high and low arsenic zones across the entire delta using artificial intelligence and quantify the number of people exposed. This study has led to the development of probabilistic models of arsenic occurrence, exposure and human health risk assessment within the delta region. The model shows a strong association of ‘surficial aquitard thickness’ and ‘groundwater-fed irrigation’ to regional-scale As-hazard.

Among the worst affected zones are the districts of Nadia (93%) and Murshidabad (82%). The study has been recently published in the international journal Science of The Total Environment. [Download Paper]

“Our AI models predict the occurrence of high arsenic in groundwater across more than half of the Ganges River delta, covering more than 25% area extent in each of the 19 out of 25 administrative zones in West Bengal. A total of 30.3 million people are estimated to be exposed to severely high As-hazard within the Ganges river delta,” said lead author Madhumita Chakraborty at IIT Kharagpur’s Dept. of Geology and Geophysics.

While the predictive model framework would prove to be vital typically for the identification of drinking water sources in arsenic affected areas of West Bengal, it can be used in other parts of the country, which are also suffering from severe groundwater pollutants, said the researchers.

“Eventually, all this information forms the baseline knowledge for the recently initiated Jal Jeevan Mission of the Government of India. The mission is based on providing safe drinking water to every household of the country within 2024 and the outcome of this provides the information for the location of safe groundwater, which is the primary source of drinking water for most of India,” opined Prof. Abhijit Mukherjee from the Dept. of Geology and Geophysics who is leading the research.

It is to be noted that Eastern India and Bangladesh, which source more than 80% of its drinking water from groundwater sources, are coping with this issue of naturally-sourced arsenic mass poisoning. The studies conducted until now were unable to offer an effective model for policy decisions due to the delineation of the local extent and geochemical mechanisms for arsenic pollution.

The researchers from IIT Kharagpur thus opted for AI which is now being used across the world to successfully model the distribution of groundwater contaminants.

“Such successful use of artificial intelligence in geoscience enables us to find answers and build prima-facie understanding before further detailed field-based investigation or validation. However, such regional-scale models do not completely eliminate the need for field investigation in many cases; especially for groundwater contaminants like arsenic which is known to exhibit well-to-well variability in concentration,” added Prof. Mukherjee.

Citation: Chakraborty et al. (2020). Modeling regional-scale groundwater arsenic hazard in the transboundary Ganges River Delta, India and Bangladesh: Infusing physically-based model with machine learning. Science of The Total Environment. Volume 748, 15 December 2020, 141107 [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.141107]

Media Coverage:

Economic Times (CIO)	Hindustan Times	News 18
Jagran Josh	Edex Live	New Indian Express
Outlook	The Week	ABP Education
NDTV		Tribune

Research Information: Prof. Abhijit Mukherjee, abhijit@gg.iitkgp.ac.in

Institute Information: Prof. B N Singh, Registrar, registrar@hijli.iitkgp.ac.in

Media Outreach: Shreyoshi Ghosh, shreyoshi@adm.iitkgp.ac.in; media@iitkgp.ac.in

Clean India, Healthy India

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Does economic growth have a positive correlation with clean drinking water in India? Researchers at IIT Kharagpur seem to be not only agreeing with this idea but even found concrete proofs. In a recent study published in the Scientific Reports, the link between the influence of economic growth in reducing fecal pathogens in groundwater has been established. These are the pathogens that are considered to be one of the key causes of water-bourne diseases, across India.

Water-bourne diseases like diarrhea have been the cause of 15.5% of total deaths in India from 1990 – 2016. The study has made first-time observations on a significant reduction of fecal pathogen concentration in the spatially variable groundwater from 2002 to 2017. The study, however, reported elevated fecal coliform concentration in potable groundwater in rural regions across India than UNGA’s safe limit of zero pathogens. Download Paper

“Looking beyond the country globally, more than one-third of the total country’s population, living in economically stressed areas of Africa and South Asia still do not have access to basic sanitation, and more than 1 billion still opt for open defecation. Until recently, India has more than 500 million open-defecating population resulting unsafe disposal of fecal waste to nearby drinking water sources poses a serious environmental crisis and public health concern,” says Prof. Abhijit Mukherjee, faculty at the School of Environmental Science and Engineering and Dept. of Geology and Geophysics at IIT Kharagpur who led the research project.

In recent years, sanitation development to achieve goal-6 of UNGA’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has been encouraged across India by implementing Clean India (Swachh Bharat) Mission. But their effect on groundwater quality and human health are yet unquantified until now. The study, published on October 23 on the Nature group of journals, gives long term, high-spatial-resolution measurements of fecal coliform concentration (>1.7 million) and acute diarrheal cases for the first time. The study data covered almost the last three decades to delineate the long-term improvement trends of groundwater quality across India, as a consequence of development.

“A uniqueness in this study to determine economic development was instead of GDP or other economic growth data, we have used satellite-based nightlight (NL) information from NASA for the period 1992-2013 which was used to investigate the statistical trends and causal relationships. In most areas’ economic development, suggested by increasing satellite-based nightlight correlated to the reduction in faecal coliform concentration and alleviation of water quality. While, sanitation and economic development can improve human health, poor education level and improper human practices can potentially affect water-borne diseases loads and thus health in parts of India.” explained Srimanti Duttagupta, Ph.D. scholar at IIT Kharagpur, second author of the research paper which has come out recently based on this study.

Numerical and statistical analyses were performed on aforesaid culled datasets to understand the efficiency of development in alleviating the water quality and public health, and relationship with economic development. Enhanced alleviation of groundwater quality and human health have been observed since 2014 with the initiation of accelerated construction of sanitation infrastructure through Swachh Bharat Mission.

In the study it was observed that in more than 80% of the study region, night-time light demonstrated to be a strong predictor for observed changes in groundwater quality, sanitation development and water-borne disease cases.

However, the goal of completely fecal-pollution free, clean drinking water is yet to be achieved, Prof. Mukherjee remarked, however, needs more data to confirm.

“Nevertheless, in areas with inferior water quality, improper human practices outweigh economic development in affecting human health,” he added.

It has been further observed that very high population density deteriorates the quality of water in certain areas. The problem of overpopulation and slums is an intricate problem that is reflected in all life aspects in countries like India. Different statistical analyses conducted in this study showed about a 3.09 % decrease in fecal coliform concentration and a 2.69% decrease in acute diarrheal cases per year for the last three decades. Groundwater quality with respect to fecal coliform concentration and acute diarrheal cases generally reduced in most areas of India and has been mostly caused by sanitation development, urbanization and related land-use changes.

Since 2014 the government has built over 100 million toilets in six lakh villages and 6.3 million toilets in cities covering a total of 600 million people (almost 60% of India’s population) which is more than the total figure for toilets since 1947. Currently, 93% of village households have toilets with a usage rate of over 90%. On October 2, while celebrating the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that India was open-defecation free. But there are facts beyond statistics primarily challenging the initiative at the level of societal and poor human practices.

The researchers opined that use and disuse and beliefs are mostly related to lower literacy rates. In turn, these results in a lack of awareness and encourage malpractice on sanitation, eventually leading to increased fecal waste into drinking water sourced from groundwater.

IIT KGP Faculty Makes Purified Drinking Water Available for Rs. 1

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Faculty from IIT KGP has developed a model for purified drinking water supply, costing Rs. 1 per family per day, for a village in Southern Bengal. Dr. Somnath Ghosal from the Rural Development Centre of IIT Kharagpur has involved participatory management offering villagers access to purified drinking water in a sustainable manner, using Water Cards, Water ATM Vending Machine, etc.

The unique set-up has been built in the Porapara village in West Midnapore district of Bengal. He has installed a fully automated multi filtered UV treated drinking water facility which can provide close to 1000 litres of purified drinking water to 60 families every day at Rs. 1 per family. While the land was freely provided by the villages, IIT KGP helped built the required infrastructure and water purification technologies and funded the entire project.

With water borne diseases and the cost of medical treatment, Dr. Ghosal took to the task of making the villagers understand the need for the water filtration unit. “It has been my dream to build up a project that involved community participation,” he said. Since such self-managed purification units require little intervention in maintenance, they require one-time investments that can become part of the CSR initiatives of both public and private enterprises. “We will be happy to do more such things through CSR Funding since the Technology and Process is now well demonstrated in this Pilot Project” added Dr. Ghosal.

The land on which the filtration unit has been installed was donated by a villager, Kshitij Mahato. In other words, it stands on land owned by a villager. The entire operation of the unit, its upkeep and daily management, is done by the villagers who have formed three committees to manage the operations. It is thus an ‘install and self-operate’ arrangement. The current, and future, financial needs are to be met by the villagers from the funds collected in the form of the daily payment (Rs 1 per family per day) for the purified water. A 17-year-old boy, Dhananjay Mahato along with three other youngsters, is in charge of the daily running of the filtration unit and the daily dispensing of filtered water from 5.30 to 8 AM. Full community participation becomes possible only if villagers have a sense of ownership over a project.

“None of this would have happened had they not placed their faith in us and trusted their own abilities. The land belongs to the villagers. They alone are now responsible for the proper functioning of the project,” remarked Dr. Ghosal. He no longer takes any part in the running of the filtration unit. In fact, he takes prior permission of the villagers before visiting the site.