Design of an environmental information system for monitoring water and air quality in urban areas

Abstract

Purpose

Over the past 50 years India has been experiencing rapid population growth, causing the migration of a large part of the population to the cities looking for livelihood. This resulted in massive increments of population in the cities that has led to the increase of pollution. Gujarat, being a highly industrialized state, is a case in point. The systems for treatment and water disposal of this state are highly challenged. The north‐western state of Gujarat has no effective systems for treatment or disposal of waste water. The purpose of this article is to address this problem, introducing a geographic information system (GIS) approach to record the characterization, analyze the needs and generate a conceptual GIS database in the state.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper outlines the background, suggested methodology for the development of a GIS database pollution dependent control of water pollution in the state of Gujarat in India. The present research is to install a document management system that has been developed in providing organizing chart, sorting, querying and retrieving of key data. A computerized laboratory information system on monitoring of quality of ambient air has been developed.

Findings

An integrated GIS database has been generated involving creation of pollutant contours, querying and visualizing the query output in spatial and non‐spatial form.

Originality/value

The authors have created a complete geo‐spatial database for the environmental monitoring for the whole state of Gujarat. They have dealt with nearly 36,000 different files from different sources and put them together to create the database. A computerized laboratory information system on monitoring of quality of ambient air has been developed. Front‐end application programs have been developed in Visual Basic and the back‐end database to integrate the laboratory data and the existing data in oracle database.

Citation

Patra, B. and Pradhan, B. (2005), "Design of an environmental information system for monitoring water and air quality in urban areas", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 14 No. 3, pp. 326-342. https://doi.org/10.1108/09653560510604992