The hope for a clean Ganga river remains eternal in our hearts. There have been several attempts at cleaning the Ganga over time, most recently under the Namami Gange project. The goal is to get to within the acceptable water quality standards, for a clean pollution free river (Nirmal Dhara), with uninterrupted, adequate flow (Aviral Dhara). Progress however, seems rather limited/ slow, with no due date in sight for making Ganga clean again.
For the data oriented, numbers on the current state of the Ganga are available on the CPCB website in real-time. There are some 30+ monitoring stations located at different points along the Ganga. These centres collect data from Ganga & publish it in near real-time. Beyond the rudimentary web portal of the CPCB, an API based access to the data should also be made available. This would allow other people to leverage the underlying data for analytical purposes & build interesting apps. Data can reveal insights on several aspects such as seasonal factors, flow volume, portions with pollution spikes, changes in pollution levels over time, impact due to specific events or interventions, etc. Open-sourcing data is the way to go!
Another source of data on Ganga water quality are the reports that get published by CPCB & other environmentalists/ researchers working in this area. At times the data published in the reports have been collected by the authors themselves & provide a secondary check to the numbers from CPCB & others.
Yet another, though less rigorous, option is to crowd-source the data. For various reasons (religious, tourism, adventure, livelihood, etc.) people visit different spots of the Ganga throughout the year. A few motivated people among them could help baseline the numbers on water quality using low-end, free/ cheap phone based apps & devices, & publish the results out for public use. Hydrocolor is one such phone based app developed as part of a Ph.D. dissertation, that uses the Phone camera (a RGB radiometer) to measure water quality. The app auto-calibrates to handle variations across devices, platforms, weather conditions, etc.
Similarly there is a home-made device called Secchi disks that can be used for measuring the turbidity of water. Aerial, drone & IOT based devices are also being conceived by people across the world as solutions to track health & pollution of water bodies in their respective cities. We could adapt such tools to monitor the state of the river Ganga over time as she progresses towards good health.
For the data oriented, numbers on the current state of the Ganga are available on the CPCB website in real-time. There are some 30+ monitoring stations located at different points along the Ganga. These centres collect data from Ganga & publish it in near real-time. Beyond the rudimentary web portal of the CPCB, an API based access to the data should also be made available. This would allow other people to leverage the underlying data for analytical purposes & build interesting apps. Data can reveal insights on several aspects such as seasonal factors, flow volume, portions with pollution spikes, changes in pollution levels over time, impact due to specific events or interventions, etc. Open-sourcing data is the way to go!
Another source of data on Ganga water quality are the reports that get published by CPCB & other environmentalists/ researchers working in this area. At times the data published in the reports have been collected by the authors themselves & provide a secondary check to the numbers from CPCB & others.
Yet another, though less rigorous, option is to crowd-source the data. For various reasons (religious, tourism, adventure, livelihood, etc.) people visit different spots of the Ganga throughout the year. A few motivated people among them could help baseline the numbers on water quality using low-end, free/ cheap phone based apps & devices, & publish the results out for public use. Hydrocolor is one such phone based app developed as part of a Ph.D. dissertation, that uses the Phone camera (a RGB radiometer) to measure water quality. The app auto-calibrates to handle variations across devices, platforms, weather conditions, etc.
Similarly there is a home-made device called Secchi disks that can be used for measuring the turbidity of water. Aerial, drone & IOT based devices are also being conceived by people across the world as solutions to track health & pollution of water bodies in their respective cities. We could adapt such tools to monitor the state of the river Ganga over time as she progresses towards good health.
