A quantitative analysis of groundwater status of Hooghly District, West Bengal, India

The present study entails groundwater level variability analysis and its relationship with groundwaterstorage change for the river-deposited plain land in Hooghly district of the Indian state of West Bengal. Various groundwaterbased maps, statistical techniques like standard deviation, groundwater storage change, etc. were adopted to analyse the status of groundwater of the district. The analysis revealed that various blocks of the Hooghly district like, Pandua, Balagrah, Singur, Chanditala II, Haripal,Chanditala I, and Tarakeswar have a sharp declined trend of average static groundwater level (mbgl) in pre-monsoon and post-monsoon conditiones. The declining trend of static groundwater level (SGWL) is more conspicuous since the district falls under the intensive agricultural practice zone. An estimation of groundwater storage change indicates that fall of SGWL in both pre-monsoon and post-monsoon condition in three blocks namely Pandua, Balagrah and Singur amounting to 15126, 12455 and 7170 Hectare-meter (ham) and 18028, 84053 and 1755 ham volume of water respectively had been actually lost from the system in 6 years of time from 2007 to 2013. A similar trend could be observed in other three nearby blocks namely, Chanditala I, Chanditala II and Tarakeswar in the same district. According to GroundwaterBlock Categorization Status, during 1994-2004 only 2 blocks, Goghat I and Pandua of Hooghly district appeared in the ‘semi-critical’ category. But surprisingly within a period of 6-7 years four more blocks of this district namely, Polba-Dadpur, Singur, Arambag and Chinsurah-Mogra have freshly entered in the same category by 2011.