Assessment of the Present State and Future Fate of River Saraswati, India: Water Quality Indices and Forecast Models as Diagnostic and Management Tools

Abstract Water quality assessment is key to the conservation and management of rivers. River Saraswati, a distributary of the river Ganga, serves as a lifeline to many villages in the district Hooghly in West Bengal, India. As the river is gradually dying due to diverse man‐made pollution, ten water quality parameters in two sampling spots (PR‐1 and PR‐2) in the river are monitored month‐wise from March 2017 to February 2020, and these are compared with those from a reference pond. The water quality index (WQI) is determined for the two riverine spots and the reference pond based on the Canadian Council of Ministers of Environment WQI (CCMEWQI) and weighted arithmetic WQI, respectively. In addition to actual observations, three different forecasting methods, exponential smoothing, autoregressive integrated moving average, and artificial neural network, are used to predict WQI for the next two years. This study indicates that free CO 2 , dissolved oxygen, and turbidity are the key parameters to evaluate this river's anthropogenic stress and health. The actual and forecasted results reflect the precipitous degradation of CCMEWQI in PR‐2. Therefore, the immediate intervention of all stakeholders is required to adopt an integrated and comprehensive river management plan to save the river from utter obliteration.