International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-018-1933-2

ORIGINAL PAPER

Development of a Functional Water Quality Index: a case study

in Brahmani River Basin, India
M. M. Sahoo1   · K. C. Patra2

Received: 8 July 2017 / Revised: 10 May 2018 / Accepted: 21 July 2018

© Islamic Azad University (IAU) 2018

Abstract
The proposed study assesses the quality of water to find out the principal contributing factor responsible for the pollution
in River Brahmani, India. These factors help the management and policymakers to set a marginal water quality standard.
Physical, chemical, and biological parameters are taken for the study. Due to the notable dissimilarity in water quality
parameters and spatiotemporal variability, significant objectives are proposed to assess the river water quality. The work
presents a functional index which can be implemented for the comparative assessment of water quality across the River Basin
controlled by several factors. The results showed that the quality of water could be improved by removal of total chromium
for all the three seasons. The parameters such as sodium, potassium, lead, and nickel have positive effect and are considered
to have high interference rate than that of other parameters such as chloride, cadmium, boron, sulfate, phosphate, fluoride,
copper, zinc, nitrate, nitrite, and ammonia, which have negative effects on functional water quality index and are accounted
as the parameters having low compliance rate. The water quality indexing methods done by previous authors are discussed
extensively in the paper, which can provide an overall idea about indexing for further research.

Keywords  Contributing factors · Spatiotemporal · Surface water · Water resource management

Introduction quality, which includes surface water regulations (1989), bath-

A river water-monitoring program can provide a representa-
tive and definitive estimation of surface water quality due to
spatiotemporal variations in river water geochemistry (Sime-
onov et al. 2003). The developed program can provide precise
information about water quality which can be considered as
an essential part of overall quality management like biologi-
cal or human health risk assessment and urban development,
planning for pollution control, management, and evaluation of
temporal trend in water quality. Several legislation and thresh-
old values have been initiated in many parts of the universe
to protect river water from industrial and agricultural diffused
water pollution to improve the surface as well as ground water
Editorial responsibility: V. K. Gupta.
* M. M. Sahoo
mrunmayee.nitrkl@outlook.com
1
School of Civil Engineering, Lovely Professional University,
Phagwara, Punjab, India
2
Department of Civil Engineering, NIT, Rourkela, Rourkela,
India
ing water regulations (1989–1998), dangerous substances
directive (76/464/EEC), shellfish directive (79/923/EEC),
groundwater directive (80/68/EEC), drinking water directive
(98/83/EEC), nitrate directive and Water Framework directive
in Europe (European Council 1998, 2000, 2006) and clean
water act by OMB 2002 (Taylor et al. 2016).
Traditional water quality evaluation usually based on
a comparison of analytical and environmental indicators
through the application of multivariate statistical methods
and exploratory data analysis (Ouyang 2005; Zhu et  al.
2007). However, the quality assessment of freshwater con-
cerning physicochemical and biological characteristics
requires comprehensive knowledge about hydrobiological
data to understand (Molden 2007; Shulkin and Nikulina
2015) along with accepted reinforcement principles. There-
fore, effective tools are required to maintain the correspond-
ence among researchers, decision makers, and the general
public. Implementation of functional management of river
water quality requires not only a tool for that can impart pre-
cise water quality information, but also it is based on deci-
sion system of policymakers. The water quality index based
on functional management can provide efficient tools for

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