Integrated multi-criteria analysis for groundwater potential mapping in Precambrian hard rock terranes (North Gujarat), India

In North Gujarat, local communities depend on the Precambrian basement aquifers for their primary source of water supply. The increasing demand for potable water puts stress on exploring for groundwater from less reliable sources of basement rocks. The main objective is to map groundwater potential zones (GWPZs) in water-scarce Precambrian terranes using integrated multi-criteria analysis (analytical hierarchy process and geospatial techniques). The output of the GWPZ map was grouped into six different categories. The results show that very high and high groundwater potentials extend over areas of 4.29% and 12.86%, respectively. The kappa index method was used for validation and showed an effective result between collected water-level data with calculated GWPZ. It shows 83.3% accuracy for very high, 85.7% for high and 90.1% for moderate GWPZs. The study shows promise and highlights that such an integrated analysis is reliable and can be applied anywhere with a similar set-up for groundwater prospecting and management.