Application of multi-criteria decision making technique for the assessment of groundwater potential zones: a study on Birbhum district, West Bengal, India

Thriving depletion of groundwater resource in the present era of green revolution and industrialization requires sustainable development and management through precise quantitative assessment-based scientific principles and modern techniques. The analytical hierarchy process (AHP) model as a popular method of multi-criteria decision-making technique is applied to determine the importance of groundwater influencing factors. Geographic information system (GIS) as a part of geospatial technology has also been used to integrate the groundwater influencing spatial dataset. In this study nine groundwater influencing thematic layers, viz. geology, drainage density, aquifer thickness, pond frequency, soil texture, lineament density, land use/land cover and rainfall, have been selected to assess groundwater potential. In this article, Birbhum district of West Bengal has been chosen as the area of case study. On the basis of AHP model and GIS technology, five groundwater potential zones have been extracted in the study area comprising very low, low, moderate, high and very high groundwater potential zones. It has been estimated that an area of 212.27 km(2) has very high potential, which is only 4.77% of the total study area. However, the areas having high, moderate, low and very low groundwater potential are about 23.33, 47.84, 25.16, and 3.65%, respectively. Finally, the validation of the groundwater potential map has been done with the data of 41 drilled boreholes which are present in a scattered manner throughout the district. The results depict that the prediction of groundwater potential zone of the area has 76.1% accuracy.