Similar to air quality, officials in Haryana will be able to monitor the water quality of Yamuna and Ghaggar rivers from five locations by the end of this year.
The Haryana State Pollution Control Board is planning to install real-time water quality monitoring stations in Yamunanagar, Karnal, Panipat, Sonipat and Faridabad.
These stations will analyze pH value, turbidity, conductivity, temperature and levels of dissolved oxygen, dissolved ammonia, biochemical oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand, nitrates and chlorides. The machines will be able to alert officials about extreme environment condition and such as high or low temperatures and toxic content. Analysis will be a lot faster than manual sampling, through which the board used to get a report once a month. With real-time monitoring, the board will be able to get 50 analysis reports in a month and collect 95 data points in a day.
Regular and timely updates will also help the board act against polluters who are releasing the untreated or partially treated wastewater into rivers, large and data sets will allow them to take remedial measures, HSPCB said.
The procurement process for fve real-time water quality monitoring systems is currently underway. Technical bids are currently under evaluation,” P Raghavendra Rao,HSPCB chairperson, told TOI.
Asked if there is a timeline to install these systems, he said, “We are targeting October or November this year to commission the work.
Another HSPCB official explained how the system works.
“All the stations will relate to a central station. This central receiving station will have software for data acquisition, data analysis, data display and report generation. Zonal offices of HSPCB will have direct access to the data from the receiving station. This will be a major shift in the communication system for transmission of data and the same will be utilized for remote vigilance in the case of water quality also,” he said.
Last year, the central pollution control board released data of a survey that said almost half 45% of ammoniacal nitrogen in Yamuna waters was from Panipat. It was followed by Gurgaon 25.25%, Faridabad 15.17%, Sonipat (10.11%), and bhiwani 2.35. of the 413 polluting industries in Haryana, 181 are in Panipat, 100 in Gurgaon, 32 in Faridabad and the remaining in Sonipat, Jhajjar and Rohtak. The textile industry is the key polluter for contributing ammoniacal nitrogen.
