Sustainable strategies for water quality management in Krishnagiri district of Tamilnadu (India)

Deterioration of drinking water quality in rural regions is a worldwide threat and considered to be one of the significant limitations in promoting sustainable development. As water quality problems become more severe and extensive throughout the world, community-level monitoring of water quality and sanitary surveillance has turned out to be inevitable and indispensable since they are the largest stakeholders and end receivers. Yet, lot of interventions needed to be overcome. Several capacity building workshops were organized for all stakeholders in Krishnagiri district of Tamilnadu (India) with an aim to promote the use of drinking water in an efficient and equitable manner consistent with the social, economic, and environmental needs of present and future generations. The programme is based on following main goals: to raise awareness among rural habitations about the impacts of fluoride in drinking water, to promote the wise, efficient use of water and to protect and enhance the quality of the water by continual monitoring using field testing kits. This programme depicted that community water quality monitoring is a low cost approach which is reliable and sustainable since being the largest stakeholders, the local community can become themselves as watch dogs for their water bodies in their vicinity.