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Rivers under stress: a comprehensive review on pollutant sources, human and ecological impacts, analytical, statistical, and geospatial methods and restoration strategies, for evaluating river water quality in India
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This comprehensive review synthesizes evidence from 145 publications on river pollution across India, covering contamination sources, health impacts, and monitoring methods. Researchers found that untreated sewage is the largest contributor to river degradation, while emerging contaminants including microplastics contribute to bioaccumulation, antibiotic resistance, and health issues in communities living near affected waterways.
This study provides a comprehensive national-scale review of river pollution in India, synthesizing evidence from 145 peer-reviewed articles, reports, and policy documents published between 2000 and 2025. Unlike earlier works limited to individual rivers or pollutants, this review integrates findings from major basins in India to capture the full complexity of contamination sources, ecological and human health risks, monitoring frameworks, and management strategies. The results establish that untreated sewage is the largest contributor, while industrial effluents enriched with heavy metals, pesticides from agricultural runoff, microplastics and pharmaceuticals from solid waste and emerging contaminants, and geogenic inputs such as arsenic and fluoride collectively degrade river quality. The synthesis reveals severe outcomes including eutrophication, biodiversity loss, microplastic bioaccumulation, antibiotic resistance, and high incidences of cancer, kidney dysfunction, fluorosis, and gastrointestinal diseases in riparian populations. Methodological advances consolidated here demonstrate how conventional physicochemical monitoring is increasingly complemented by ICP-MS, HPLC, GC-MS, statistical indices (WQI, HPI, ERI, HI, HQ), multivariate analyses (PCA, FA, CA), GIS-based hotspot mapping, and AI/ML-driven predictive models, while transport simulations using SWAT, QUAL2K, WASP, and MIKE 11 enhance source identification and risk forecasting. Mitigation outputs emphasize hybrid strategies: strict source control through CETPs, STPs, and Zero Liquid Discharge, advanced treatment using AOPs, adsorption, and membrane systems, and ecosystem-based measures such as riverbank filtration, wetlands, and phycoremediation, integrated within national programs like Namami Gange. The outputs of this review lie in providing a unified evidence base, highlighting critical research and governance gaps, and framing a technically grounded, policy-relevant roadmap for sustainable river basin management aligned with SDG 6, SDG 11, SDG 13, and SDG 15.
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