Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Sustainable Water Resources Management (2020) 6:28 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40899-020-00375-x ORIGINAL ARTICLE Groundwater quality assessment of Allahabad smart city using GIS and water quality index H. K. Pandey 1  · Vivek Tiwari 2  · Saurabh Kumar 1  · Aniket Yadav 1  · S. K. Srivastava 3 Received: 2 October 2018 / Accepted: 24 January 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 Abstract Groundwater quality plays a very important role in groundwater protection as well as demarcation of the groundwater depleted area which may be attempted for its improvement and conservation. An efort has been made to comprehend the water quality of Allahabad city with the help of groundwater sampling, their chemical analysis, and synthesis of results in GIS framework. The assessment of physiochemical parameters of groundwater samples for drinking purpose has been made using Water Quality Index and Geographic Information System. Spatial distribution of pH, electrical conductivity, total dissolved solids, fuoride, iron, total alkalinity, total hardness, chloride, sulphate, sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, bicarbonate, and nitrate content of groundwater samples collected from 12 locations and studied for pre-monsoon (May 2016) and post monsoon (Nov 2017) periods has been assessed using Arc-GIS. Water quality maps of pre-monsoon period reveal that 4.23% area is falling under good, 74.82% under moderate, and 12.12% under poor and 0.66% under very poor category while water quality maps for post monsoon period reveal that the 40.33% of area falls under good, 58.89% area under moderate and 0.77% under poor water quality. The observed values of various physiochemical parameters of water samples were also compared with standard values recommended by IS 10,500:2012. It is observed that depth to water has positive correlation with TDS, electrical conductivity, and hardness. The extent of pollution occurred in the city is due to over exploitation of groundwater, urbanization, and anthropogenic activities. Keywords WQI · GIS · Allahabad · TDS Introduction Environmental protection and water quality preservation are one of the essential tasks for each person in the world (Alban 2014). Global urbanization is causing serious issue mainly to the quality of water coming from diferent sources which are being collected in large water bodies (Alban et al. 2016). Water is the most important factor for shaping the land surface and regulating the climate. It is one of the most important natural resource that profoundly infuence the entire ecosystem. Due to rapid industrialization and urbani- zation, the demand of groundwater has increased many folds in the last few decades which in turn has created stress on water resources particularly groundwater. Poor groundwater quality also leads to human health hazards and consumes lot of expenses on treatment of diferent kind of water borne diseases. Once the groundwater is polluted, it is very difcult to rehabilitate it. The rapid pace of agricultural develop- ment, industrialization, and urbanization has also resulted in the over exploitation and contamination of ground water resources in diferent parts of the country. This has resulted in various adverse environmental impacts which afects the long-term sustainability of groundwater resource. Most of the population in India is dependent on groundwater for drinking purpose. The latest estimates of Central Pollution Control Board show about 29,000 million liter/day of waste- water is generated from Class-I and Class-II towns out of which about 45% is generated from 35 Metro cities alone (Mangukiya et al. 2012). The groundwater quality data are very important and crucial for decision regarding the quality assessment and its treatment. There has been considerable advancement in classifcation of groundwater particularly * H. K. Pandey hkp@mnnit.ac.in 1 Civil Engineering Department, MNNIT, Allahabad, India 2 Institute of Agriculture Science, BHU, Varanasi, India 3 CGWB, Ministry of Jal Shakti, Govt. of India, Faridabad, India