Bacteriological evaluation of groundwater in open-defecation-free villages of Kurukshetra district, Haryana, India

ABSTRACT

The present study was designed to analyse the microbiological quality of groundwater in open-defaecation-free (ODF) villages of the Kurukshetra district in Haryana. Twenty-seven groundwater samples were collected from borewells of nine ODF villages located in three different blocks of the Kurukshetra district in three seasons and analysed for total and faecal coliform count. The presence of gram-negative, rod-shaped bacteria was observed in all the groundwater samples and the dominating genera found were Klebsiella sp. All strains were found to be resistant to clindamycin (100%) followed by gentamicin (66.6%), azithromycin and streptomycin (50%) and chloramphenicol (33.3 %) antibiotics. Minimum resistance of isolates was observed for antibiotic norfloxacin, ciprofloxacin (16.66%) and zero resistance were observed against tetracycline. The Multiple Antibiotic Resistance (MAR) index values indicated that in a majority of the samples (66.6%), the source of contamination was non-human, but nearly 33.3% were found to be contaminated by some human sources.

KEYWORDS:

• Coliforms
• groundwater
• pollution
• waste
• health
• Kurukshetra

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the Director, Institute of Environmental Studies, Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra, India, for providing laboratory facilities for the research and Dr Suresh Jain, IIT, Tirupati for suggestions; to all the residents who allowed us to collect water samples; and to the kind reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.