03 · Reading Data and Reports

Coming Soon

What this article covers

Data is only useful if you can read it. India’s river monitoring system produces a steady stream of reports, indices, and dashboards — but most of them are not designed for non-specialists. This article teaches you to decode them.

Topics will include:

• Water Quality Index (WQI): how individual parameters are weighted and combined into a single score, and the limitations of that compression
• CPCB annual reports: how to navigate them, what the key tables mean, and how to find data for a specific river or stretch
• Prescribed standards and acceptable limits: what BIS, CPCB, and WHO standards say, and the crucial difference between “within limits” and “safe”
• How to spot data quality problems: missing values, inconsistent sampling frequency, and when to be sceptical of a published number
• Practical exercise: reading a real published river quality report and extracting the most important signal

The most important skill in this series

Being able to read a monitoring report critically — knowing what it proves, what it omits, and where the uncertainty lies — is more valuable than memorising parameter thresholds. This article focuses on building that judgement.

Full article coming soon

This page is a placeholder. The full article will include annotated excerpts from real CPCB reports and a walkthrough of reading a WQI score card.