The Water Watch project is being conducted in Amreli, Aurangabad, Udaipur, Bangalore, Pondicherry, Madurai, Ranikhet, Indore, Bhopal and Varanasi. Water Scarcity, geographical terrain, over-exploitation of urban water, contamination of rivers flowing through the city, and requirement of water harvesting were some of the criteria followed for selection of these cities. The project is being coordinated with like – minded local NGOs in these respective cities. Six schools are involved in each city.

The objective of the project is to create awareness among students and communities regarding the threat to our fresh water resources and urgent need to conserve it. One of the important components of the project was to prepare the water quality maps for the 10 cities.

Various activities were undertaken as a part of the project like providing scientific skills to students on testing the quality of drinking water, generating awareness, and suggesting remedial measures. Beginning from water quality monitoring to activities like tap water harvesting were carried out as a part of the project.

Students and teachers from each school were asked to identify five locations for water monitoring around their schools. Each school then identified exact sampling location at different areas of interest like residential areas, slums, industrial areas and public places. Drinking water quality from different sources like municipal supply, ground water from hand pumps, wells and bore wells were monitored. Samples were collected after taking necessary precautions and analysed. The tests results were recorded in a Monitoring data record sheet which indicates the actual reading as against the permissible / desirable limits. The chemical tests provided ample data regarding potability of water and could directly point to the existence of organic pollution, if any. The bacteriological tests gave confirmatory evidence of faecal contamination of water. The data was integrated and projected through the maps. Two sets of water monitoring, one in October 2003 and the next in December 2003 was conducted

Contamination of drinking water has become a major challenge to the Environmentalist in the rapid developing countries. As more and more people are exposed to contamination of drinking water, many issues arise that not only involve premeditating the contaminated water, but also preventing similar situations from occurring in future. The drinking water is contaminated through the pipe distribution system or directly through ground water.

Mapping the water quality parameters using the Decision Support system like GIS, can be useful for taking quick decisions as graphical representation would be easy to facilitate policy makers in taking a decision. A spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) is a computer –based system designed to assist the decision system. Typically, such a system will include spatial data relevant to the decision, analytical tools to process the data in ways meaningful for decision makers, and output or display functions. Geographical Information System (GIS) is an information system that is specially designed for handling spatial (or geographical) data. GIS has the advantage of handling attribute data in conjunction with spatial features, which was totally impossible with manual cartographic analysis. It combines a set of interrelated software components that create, edit, manipulate, analyse and display data both in text and graphic forms.