Abstract
Water is one of the basic necessities to survive on earth, access to clean drinking water is the right of every human being but
unfortunately water resources are getting polluted due to industrialization, improper management of waste and overpopulation.
The objective of this research is to evaluate drinking water quality in Western Lahore. For convenience in sample collection
the area under observation was divided into six zones and a total number of 72 drinking water samples were obtained and put
to wide-ranging physicochemical analysis. Each sample was tested for 12 parameters including pH, turbidity, total dissolved
solids (TDS), electrical conductivity (EC), Total Hardness, Calcium, Magnesium, total Alkalinity, Chloride, Nitrate, Carbonate
and bicarbonate. The outcomes were compared with standards of World Health organization (WHO) and national standards
for drinking water quality (NSDWQ). Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW) technique was used to create zone wise maps within
GIS environment. At last Water Quality Index (WQI) was calculated to discover the fitness of water for human consumption.
The results showed that TDS in 11Z5 (1099.2 ppm), EC in 8Z1 (119.8 ppm), 10Z1 (113.2 ppm), 7Z2 (132.4 ppm), 10Z2 (138.9
ppm), 11Z5 (174.5 ppm), 1Z6 (114.8 ppm) and Calcium (296 ppm) in 3Z3 are exceeding the permissible limits. Moreover,
samples from 8Z2, 8Z4, 11Z5 and 12Z5 have poor WQI. So, water from these locations is unfit for human consumption and
need better water quality management.
