Implementation of IT Tool for Centralized Water Quality Sampling Collection and Analysis

Abstract

The Punjab water supply and sewerage board department supplies drinking water in 62 U.L.B.’s of Punjab state. To ensure the quality of drinking water is a matter of top priority for the department to provide. With this plan to ensure good water quality, routine drinking water testing is essential to analyze various parameters of drinking water that give information about the quality of water. For this purpose, drinking water testing in the state is being done but this testing is not regular and uniform. The critical challenge in the maintaining water quality is to ensure proper sampling of drinking water, which is very difficult to standardize in the state and is the main reason or need for this study. The study came up with an innovative approach of designing an in-house centralized water quality surveillance cell situated at the head office, which monitors the sampling of drinking and wastewater and a dedicated uniform procedure with the help of I.T. as a primary tool. Each source of water and wastewater is geotagged and provides a Q.R. code, and sampling is done with the help of a mobile application. All project activities like sample scheduling, sampling, testing records are done on a live cloud-based database to minimize chances of error and reduce manual efforts by using I.T. as a power tool. With this key initiative, departmental efforts of field staff decreased considerably, and the sampling quality has improved a lot.