https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1995/0244/report.pdf

Article Pesticide contamination of ground water in the United Staes—A review

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/04fc/d536206ebbcaf6cfd5ad8650301ead6931e6.pdf

Groundwater pollution occurs when pollutants are released to the ground and make their way down into groundwater. It can also occur naturally due to the presence of a minor and unwanted constituent, contaminant or impurity in the groundwater, in which case it is more likely referred to as contamination rather than pollution.

Pollution can occur from over application of fertilizers and pesticides in agriculture. Pollution (or contamination) can also occur from naturally occurring contaminants, such as arsenic or fluoride. Using polluted groundwater causes hazards to public health through poisoning or the spread of disease.

Very insightful. Thanks for all the answers.

Of course yes ,the constituents of these chemicals shall leached with irrigation water and pollute underground water .

YES.

Please check the following article.

Article Slow poisoning through water intake - are we conscious?

Thanks Ali and Pattanayak

Pesticide use has grown because not only must our exploding population be supplied with food, but crops and food are grown for export to other countries. The United States has become the largest producer of food products in the world, partly owing to our use of modern chemicals (pesticides) to control the insects, weeds, and other organisms that attack food crops. But, as with many things in life, there's a hidden cost to the benefit we get from pesticides. We've learned that pesticides can potentially harm the environment and our own health. Water plays an important role here because it is one of the main ways that pesticides are transported from the areas where they are applied to other locations, where they may cause health problems.

Pesticides can contaminate groundwater

Pesticide contamination of groundwater is a subject of national importance because groundwater is used for drinking water by about 50 percent of the Nation's population. This especially concerns people living in the agricultural areas where pesticides are most often used, as about 95 percent of that population relies upon groundwater for drinking water. Before the mid-1970s, it was thought that soil acted as a protective filter that stopped pesticides from reaching groundwater. Studies have now shown that this is not the case. Pesticides can reach water-bearing aquifers below ground from applications onto crop fields, seepage of contaminated surface water, accidental spills and leaks, improper disposal, and even through injection waste material into wells.

Chemicals can take a long time to appear in groundwater

📷The effects of past and present land-use practices may take decades to become apparent in groundwater. When weighing management decisions for protection of groundwater quality, it is important to consider the time lag between application of pesticides and fertilizers to the land and arrival of the chemicals at a well. This time lag generally decreases with increasing aquifer permeability and with decreasing depth to water. In response to reductions in chemical applications to the land, the quality of shallow groundwater will improve before the quality of deep groundwater, which could take decades.

Pesticides are mostly modern chemicals. There are many hundreds of these compounds, and extensive tests and studies of their effect on humans have not been completed. That leads us to ask just how concerned we should be about their presence in our drinking water. Certainly it would be wise to treat pesticides as potentially dangerous and, thus, to handle them with care. We can say they pose a potential danger if they are consumed in large quantities, but, as any experienced scientist knows, you cannot draw factual conclusions unless scientific tests have been done. Some pesticides have had a designated Maximum Contaminant Limit (MCL) in drinking water set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but many have not. Also, the effect of combining more than one pesticide in drinking water might be different than the effects of each individual pesticide alone. It is another situation where we don't have sufficient scientific data to draw reliable conclusions.

Thank you so much Singh

Greeting Sir

The answers provided are quite realistic. Perhaps just to add a little. The contamination of ground water by fertilizers or pesticides will depend on the

(i)Nature of the chemicals - Chemical Products which have high solubility in water are more likely to travel slowly to contaminate ground water as compared with others which have little solubility which will mostly adsorb on soil particles.

(ii)Similarly the nature of soil towards the ground water can also matter in that sand soils will have high potential for ground water contamination than clay soils.

(iii)Again Places where ground water is closer to the land surface will have higher chances for ground water contamination as compared to places where ground water is many meters far away from land surface.