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Assessment of heavy metal contamination in livestock drinking water of Upper Ganga Canal (Roorkee City, India)

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Abstract

The emphasis upon livestock health requires regular assessment of livestock drinking water quality. The results of this study are based on 12 months of water quality survey over 18 sites in Upper Ganga Canal (UGC) in Roorkee City, India, covering a command area of nearly 450 km2. Conventionally, the water of the UGC provides irrigation to agricultural land, and also it is used as a source of livestock drinking water. In this study, special attention was paid to quantify the major metallic contaminants such as aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, copper, iron, lead, manganese, mercury, and zinc. Subsequently, a suitability analysis was performed by comparing the observed concentrations of heavy metals with the existing water quality guidelines proposed by regulatory agencies, such as the Australian and New Zealand Environment and Conservation Council (ANZECC, 2000), Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME, 2008), Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, South Africa (DWAF, 1996), and Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO, 1985). The arithmetic weightage-based heavy metal pollution index (HPI) was also computed considering all the metals together to evaluate the pollution status of the UGC canal. Results of water quality analysis indicate that the levels of mercury and manganese were considerably higher than their permissible limit in water. Concentrations of heavy metals viz., lead, arsenic, chromium, cobalt, cadmium, and copper, along with aluminum, were found to be mostly within their recommended limits. HPI of water in UGC, Roorkee, was found to be suitable for livestock drinking, excluding three sites.

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Data Availability

The samples were collected and laboratory experiments were conducted to determine the concentration of heavy metal parameters. These are the data for this research and are available in the manuscript.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions were helpful in substantially improving the initial version of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Water Resources Development and Management, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India

    Tesfamariam Abreha Bahita, Sabyasachi Swain & Ashish Pandey

  2. College of Engineering, Debre Berhan University, Debre Birhan, Ethiopia

    Tesfamariam Abreha Bahita

  3. Department of Population Health and Reproduction, Veterinary Medicine School, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

    Pramod Pandey

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  1. Tesfamariam Abreha Bahita
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Bahita, T.A., Swain, S., Pandey, P. et al. Assessment of heavy metal contamination in livestock drinking water of Upper Ganga Canal (Roorkee City, India). Arab J Geosci 14, 2861 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12517-021-08874-7

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