World Environment 2019, 9(2): 46-55 DOI: 10.5923/j.env.20190902.03 Treatment of Contaminated Ground Water Using Phytoremediation Technique at Anantapur, India Piyush Gupta 1,* , Paturu Siva Niveditha 2 , S. Sharada 2 1 Wood Plc (Formerly Amec Foster Wheeler), Environmental & Infrastructure, Kuwait 2 Department of Chemical Engineering, JNTUA College of Engineering, Ananthapuramu, Andhra Pradesh, India Abstract One of the burning problems of our industrial society is the high consumption of water and the high demand for clean drinking water. Groundwater is used for domestic, industrial water supply and for irrigation all over the world. Although three-fourths of the earth is being surrounded by sea only a little portion of it can be used for drinking purpose. The use of aquatic plants for water and waste water treatment is increasing nowadays. The aim of the project is to examine the phytoremediation potential of water hyacinth (Eichhornia Crassipes) and water lettuce (Pistia Stratiotes). The study area faces water scarcity as well as water quality problems. Therefore, attempts were made to treat the groundwater at Anantapur, India using these species. The growth parameters of species like the number of leaves, plant weight, length of principal root and number of roots were studied. The results of the treatment methods were compared with respect to removal efficiency of these species for different water quality parameters. The study revealed that water hyacinth had higher contaminant reduction capability than water lettuce for various physicochemical water parameters. Keywords Phytoremediation, Water hyacinth, Water lettuce, Physicochemical, Water quality, Constructed wetland, Removal efficiency 1. Introduction Around 97.5% of the total available water on earth is saline water and only 2.5% is fresh water. The greater portion of this fresh water (68.7%) is in the form of ice and 29.9% exists as fresh groundwater. Water quality is essential for wellbeing of the people. It can be affected by physicochemical and biological pollutants. Contaminates such as bacteria, viruses, heavy metals, nitrate and salt have found their way into water supplies (Atta and Razzak, 2008). In arid and semi-arid regions, where well managed water transportation system and related infrastructures are not available, groundwater serves as chief source of drinking water. Groundwater is influenced by many factors, including composition of precipitation, mineralogy of the aquifers, climate, topography and anthropogenic activities (Kumar and Riyazuddin, 2008). According to the United States of Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA, 1993), groundwater becomes contaminated naturally or because of numerous types of human activities like residential, municipal, industrial and agricultural. In recent days, * Corresponding author: piyush123123@gmail.com (Piyush Gupta) Published online at http://journal.sapub.org/env Copyright © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Scientific & Academic Publishing This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ groundwater quality is decreasing day by day due to rapid urbanization and fast industrial growth. Unrestricted exploration of groundwater and excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides make possible the infiltration of detrimental constituents to the groundwater. These activities can contaminate groundwater quality of Anantapur and can cause health problems. Therefore, a detailed study was conducted to treat the groundwater of Anantapur area using phytoremediation technique. Phytoremediation is one of the biological wastewater treatment methods (Roongtanakiat et al., 2007) and is the concept of using plants-based systems and microbiological processes to eliminate contaminants in nature. The principles of phytoremediation system are to clean up contaminated water which includes identification and implementation of efficient aquatic plant; uptake of dissolved nutrients and metals by the growing plants; and harvest and beneficial use of the plant biomass produced from the remediation system (Lu, 2009). The most important factor in implementing phytoremediation is the selection of an appropriate plant (Roongtanakiatet al., 2007; Stefani et al., 2011) which should have high uptake of both organic and inorganic pollutants, grow well in polluted water and easily controlled in quantitatively propagated dispersion (Roongtanakiat et al., 2007). The uptake and accumulation of pollutants vary from plant to plant and also from specie to specie within a genus (Singh et al., 2003; Gupta et al., 2012). The economic success of phytoremediation largely depends on