Pollution Source Identification and Suitability Assessment of Groundwater Quality for Drinking Purposes in Semi-Arid Regions of the Southern Part of India
, Shunmuga Priya Kaliyappan 3, Hussein Almohamad 4, Ali Abdullah Aldosari 5,* and Hazem Ghassan Abdo 6Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsDear Authors;
The manuscript needs further justification to get ready for publication in an international journal such as Water. Please see my comments in the attached file.
Good luck
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Moderate editing
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 1,
We are highly obliged for the time and effort you put in to provide suggestions for enhancing the manuscript.
Correction and comments that you have mentioned in the PDF has been carried out and highlighted in RED colour.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsComments for author File: Comments.pdf
The paper needs a profound checking and rewriting by a native English speaker because it is plenty of grammatical errors and bad constructed sentences, thus very difficult to read and follow in its reasoning
Author Response
Dear Reviewer 2,
We are highly obliged for the time and effort you put in to provide suggestions for enhancing the manuscript.
The response to the individual comment is outlined below.
- Please, provide adequate references for the chapter “Study area”
Response: Thank you for your suggestion. Study area details has been properly cited
- Please, include a map of India in Fig. 1, in order to clearly identify the location of the study area
Response: Thank you for your suggestion. Correction has been carried out.
- Please, better explain the steps followed to calculate EWQIs, for example: how the matrices are constructed, how they fit in the successive steps, what is P, etc.
Response: Each step of EWQI has been included and numbered. Correction has been carried out.
- Please, provide a table with WHO thresholds that are cited in the abstract and in the manuscript.
Response: Thank you for your suggestion, we followed WHO 2007 standard for Drinking water quality. If you need, we will provide a separate supplementary sheet for the same.
- In my opinion, figures 2-5 would be much more interesting if they would reproduce lateral variations of the specific parameters instead of highlighting sites exceeding WHO limits. In this way, horizontal trends might be evidenced and linked to specific point sources located in the territory.
Response: Vertical movement of contamination has been analysed in the present study and Lateral or horizontal movement of contamination has planned to prepare new manuscript.
- Several references are missing in the “Results and Discussion” session when origins and sources of analyzed parameters are described (e.g. lines 183-185, 191-193, 201-204, 210-212, 221-225, 236-240, 248-251, 258-261272-273, 286-288, 303-306).
Response: The present study results were compared with previous studies and thank you for your suggestion to improve it.
- Line 297: reference Panneerselvam et al., 2021 should be identified with a number.
Response: Thank you for your suggestion. Correction has been carried out in same line
- Lines 313-318. I see a contradiction here: First, the authors say that “About 22.22%, 61.11% and 16.67% of the samples are excellent, good and medium quality of water for drinking purpose respectively” (lines 313-315). Then they say that “The results divulged that major part of the study region has contaminated and need advanced level of treatment before use for drinking and other domestic purpose. The safety and remedial measure should be followed in contaminated zones in order to reduce the contamination for drinking uses” (lines 315-318). This does not reflect what written immediately before and what reported in Table 1, where it is evident that about 83% of the analyzed samples are fit for drinking purposes.
Response: Thank you for your question and suggestion. We are confirming that, 22.22+61.11 = around 83% of samples were excellent and good category for drinking water. We suggest and recommend remedial measure to reduce the contamination in 17% of the study area.
- 6 is unnecessary and should be deleted.
Response: Correction has been carried out in the main text.
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsDear Authors;
Thank you for addressing my comments. My suggestion is acceptance.
Good luck
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe authors have addressed all the issues raised during the revision. In my opinion the manuscript can be accepted for publication
