IoT-Based Water Quality Monitoring System for Rural Uttar Pradesh: A Survey and Proposed Framework

Clean drinking water is something most people in cities take for granted. But for millions living in rural Uttar Pradesh, it remains an everyday struggle. Villages across districts like Bahraich, Shravasti, Unnao, and Balrampur rely on groundwater — often contaminated by arsenic, fluoride, and agricultural runoff — without any reliable means of testing it before consumption. This paper surveys existing IoT-based water quality monitoring systems and identifies their shortcomings when applied to Indian rural conditions. Based on this review, we propose a low-cost monitoring framework using pH, turbidity, TDS, and temperature sensors, interfaced with an Arduino microcontroller and a GSM module for SMS-based alerts. The system is designed to operate even without internet access — a deliberate design choice given poor connectivity in many UP villages — while also supporting cloud upload via Wi-Fi when available. Total hardware cost is estimated below Rs. 6,000, making it deployable at scale through Gram Panchayats. This work is positioned as a preliminary design study, with hardware implementation planned as future work.