Participatory Digital Platform for Water Quality Management Integrated with Advanced Chlorine Decay Model for Health Management Assessment

Abstract

Access to clean and safe drinking water remains a persistent challenge in many rural regions across the globe. In India, while significant infrastructural efforts have expanded piped water supply coverage, the quality and safety of drinking water remain compromised due to inadequate disinfection practices, decaying infrastructure, and lack of community-level decision-making mechanisms. Standardized, centralized water management approaches fail to account for the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of water-related risks at the household and community levels. Moreover, conventional assessment tools like the Water Poverty Index (WPI) and Water Quality Index (WQI) often obscure granular vulnerabilities by aggregating them into single-point scores. This research proposes a novel, participatory, geo-enabled, and data-driven solution Mera Gaon Hamara Jal a digital platform designed to enable decentralized, stakeholder-informed water governance. The platform integrates a Multi-level, Multi-stakeholder Decision Module (MMDM) that translates household-level indicator data into real-time, context-specific insights tailored to five levels of governance, from individual households to national agencies. A comprehensive set of 50+ indicators, derived from participatory rural appraisal tools and validated through stakeholder engagement, enables a bottom-up risk assessment framework addressing the social, economic, environmental, and institutional dimensions of water sustainability. To address growing concerns around the inconsistency of disinfection in water supply, the platform incorporates an enhanced model for chlorine decay and health risk assessment. This module simulates chlorine decay based on real-world parameters pipe material, water temperature, flow dynamics, and organic load predicting microbial and chemical risk zones across water distribution networks. To validate the biological implications of varying chlorine levels, in vivo toxicity assays using Caenorhabditis elegans were conducted newline