The Times of India 22.11.2010
Water board to dig 52 new bore wells
PANAJI: Central ground water board (CGWB) will dig 52 new bore wells and install digital water level recorders in most of them to gather data for assessment of ground water resources in various parts of Goa. "The new equipment will help record data once every six hours and four times a day," a CGWB source said.
Ground water assessment is expected to receive a big boost as the state water resources department has also undertaken a hydrology project envisaging setting up of 110 ground water monitoring stations, including 65 bore wells and 45 existing open wells by 2012. More than 50% work on the 22.64 crore-project, including a soft loan of 18.71 crore from World Bank, has been completed.
The study by both agencies will provide data on various aspects, including quality of ground water and quantum of rainfall. Explaining the process of gathering data, the CGWB source said that the memory clip inside the recorder will reveal water levels and diurnal changes on a daily basis. The automatically programmed recorders will obviate the need for officials to visit the sites frequently.
"The officials can visit the site after a fortnight, retrieve the chip and feed it into a laptop computer, record the data and put it back in the installation. The location of wells will seek to cover all areas, though not hilly parts, and each well will be in a radius of 18 km.
Recently, the board had announced findings of analysis of ground water assessment from 38 open wells during May 2010 in a bid to trace pollutants, especially heavy metals and organic. Most samples indicated a reading of less than 500 microsiemens per centimeter at 25 degrees Celsius for electrical conductivity (EC), indicating it is free of contamination. For this reason, only a few samples were further tested for all 14 parameters and the readings showed that ground water quality is good for drinking and other purposes, board sources said. However, the samples do not cover all problem areas in Goa, especially industrial estates and springs and some coastal villages which have been contaminated by influx of sewage and other pollutants.
