An overview of water quality indices as promising tools for assessing the quality of water resources
Vishal Kamboj, Nitin Kamboj, Aditi Bisht
Abstract
The unsustainable interference of anthropogenic activities such as industrialization, urbanization, tourism, mining, agriculture sector deterioration the water resources. Day by day the quality of the water resources is declined and that creates many problems such as disturbing the aquatic life, human health, and other intended uses. In the middle of the 1960s, a tool i.e. water quality indices developed to assess the water quality of the water body simply and understandably. The WQI value depends on the water quality parameters such as physico-chemical, heavy metal, and biological parameters. Each water quality parameter plays an important role in describing the quality of the water resources. The monitoring of pollution sources i.e. point and non-point sources in the water body is expensive and difficult. Nowadays, a total of 33 WQI are available, who show the quality of a water body by ranking i.e. very good, good, poor, and very poor. Each WQI shows their property and some are developed on a regional or local area basis. So, in this chapter, we discuss the commonly used WQI throughout the world which is used for ranking the water quality. The present overview indicates the basic concept and steps, advantages, and disadvantages of the WQI.