Delineation of groundwater potential zones in Mewat District, Haryana, India

Groundwater is one of the very precious natural resource of earth that sustains all human activities. It is essential not only for sustenance of the human life but also for the economic and social progress of a region. Present paper is an attempt to delineate groundwater potential zones in a southern district of Haryana, named Mewat. Survey of India toposheets, satellite imageries and some other collateral data is used for the preparation of thematic layers like geology, geomorphology, percent slope, drainage density, lineament density and land use/land cover of the study area. Multicriteria evaluation technique is used to integrate all the thematic layers. Individual themes and their corresponding categories are assigned a knowledge base ranking from 1 to 6 depending on their suitability to hold groundwater and their weightage are calculated. Using rater calculator tool in Arc GIS software, all thematic maps are integrated to produce a composite groundwater potential map of the study area. This map was further classified into five categories which represents very poor to excellent potential zones. The study reveals that paleo channels and alluvial plain are the geomorphological features with excellent potential for groundwater occurrence followed by aeolian plain. The residual hills, structural hills and linear ridges due to high slope and absence of primary porosity lies in the very poor to poor potential zones.