Suitability Assessment for Selecting New Sites for Installing Water Service Centres within English Bazar Municipality, Malda, West Bengal

Sk ZIAUL1, Swades PAL1
1University of Gour Banga, Faculty of Arts and Commerce, Department of Geography, Malda, West Bengal, INDIA
E-mail: skziaul87@gmail.com,swadeshpal82@gmail.com
Pages: 167-178

Abstract. Being the sole emerging district town of Malda, English Bazar Municipality (area: 13.25 km2) is highly populated (total population=216,083), severely suffering from insufficient safe drinking water. It has attempted to supply purified safe drinking water through some water service centres (locally called Jaladhar) from where most of the people collect the necessary drinking water. There are 72 such service centres, spatially distributed in 29 wards of this municipality. Due to unequal population distribution and varying growth of population, it is essential to review whether the existing distribution is rational. Therefore, we attempted to find out some suitable sites, where additional water service centres are required, based on six demand parameters (population density, public service centre, existing water supply centres, location of bus stand, centroid of the ward/mouzas, land use as accessible point). From this purpose, both knowledge based and objective weighted composite index based spatial models have been prepared. Slightly different results have been yielded by the two models but the trends of site selection proved to be almost identical. About 4.29% out of total area, covering wards number 9, 15 and 19, have proved to be in high demand of high water service centres, mainly located in the core area of the municipality. 

K e y w o r d s:  suitability analysis, water service centre, weighted linear combination, knowledge based weighting, objective weighting, demand supply ratio, GIS analysis