Impact of Agricultural Practices on Groundwater in Tirunelveli District, India

Groundwater has been one of the major problems in developing countries like India. The Problems are in two manners 1) Reduction in the groundwater table and another one is 2) groundwater pollution. There are many reasons for the pollution of groundwater. This paper intend to present preliminary study of agricultural practices in tirunelveli district and its effect on the groundwater, assessing and determining the important parameter that has serious effects on human being, and developing a model for predicting the nitrate in groundwater. NRSC class-I classification scheme was adopted and landuse maps were prepared from satellite images.Water samples were collected in the three types of landuse region namely agricultural region, industrial region and other regions for the year 2010 and 2012. With the result of tested water sample and spatial variation map the impact of agriculture and other landuse practices on groundwater were compared and statistically analyzed. The major groundwater quality parameter that was found in the agricultural practicing area is identified as nitrate. The regression model is developed to predict the nitrate content. From the output of the regression model the spatial variation map of nitrate is prepared.