Selection and management of groundwater arsenic remediation approaches in Northern India

This research project aims to contribute to the development and validation of a robust and effective toolkit for the selection and/or management of groundwater arsenic remediation strategies in arsenic-impacted areas of the Gangetic Basin in northern India (such as Patna)

The details

Globally, the contamination of groundwater from naturally-occurring arsenic is a major public health threat impacting the health and livelihoods of millions of people, particularly in South/Southeast Asia. In India, groundwater arsenic is a major problem particularly in shallow, reducing aquifers of the Gangetic Basin where groundwater reliance is increasingly high.

Despite the prevalence of a number of remediation strategies, effective and sustainable implementation of these strategies remains very challenging for a number of technical and non-technical reasons.

Further, rapidly developing urban areas (including northern India for example in Patna, Bihar) create unique challenges such as high groundwater pumping rates (which may impact the hydrogeochemical controls on arsenic mobilisation), the presence of potential competing water quality risks such as emerging organic contaminants and highly variable socio-economic conditions, all of which may vary greatly on the local or regional scale.

There is a clear need for improved decision support tools for the selection and management of arsenic remediation strategies, particularly in this context.

The graduate researcher on this project is: Ajmal Roshan

Supervision team

• The University of Manchester: Doctor Laura Richards
• The University of Melbourne: Associate Professor Meenakshi Arora