Abstract
Abstract. Even though planning process particularly economic development plan and its implementation in Nepal has been initiated with first five-year plan in 1952/54, land resource planning was overshadowed and only regional level data base on land use, land system and land capability were produced by Land Resource Mapping Project in 1983/84 and made available for planners and decision makers for sectoral planning in regional scale. During past, different policies and national planning efforts were made for balanced use of country’s existing natural resources but Nepal has not practiced land-use planning for the country as a whole at local level. It is initiated only after ninth five year plan (1997–2002) with the establishment of National Land Use Project under Ministry of Land Reform and Management and formulation of National Land Use Policy 2013 and its revision in 2015 after devastating earthquake. Land use council, Land use technical committee, District level land use monitoring committee and VDC/municipality level land use committee are institutional set ups for implementing planning works done by National Land Use Project at district and local levels. Resource maps produced by different international agency associated with India, Canada, USA, Japan and Finland were worked as basis for formulation of local level land use plans. Presently National Land Use Project (NLUP) has prepared land resources maps, geo-database and reports covering almost half of total VDCs of the country moreover in Terai region. Seven components of land resources management required for local level land use planning are present land use map, soil map, land capability map, hazard risk map, land use zoning map, cadastral superimpose on land use zoning map along with its geo-database and report except VDC profile. In first time, geospatial technology-RS, GIS and GPS were extensively applied in preparation of all these resource maps and creation of their geo-database for local level land use planning.
Highlights
Planning process in Nepal has been initiated with the first development plan in 1956 after few years of downfall of Rana Rule, aiming of improving the wellbeing of people focusing on economic development of Nepal (Srivastava, 2008) without spatial consideration
The level-1 categories of the land use consisting of eleven classes were as Agriculture (AGR), Forest (FOR), Residential (RES), Commercial (COM), Industrial (IND), Public Service (PUB), Mine and Minerals (MIN), Cultural and Archeological (CULARCH), Riverine and Lake Area (HYD), Excavation Area (EXC) and Other (OTH)
Even though landsat image and aerial photographs were found used in preparation of land resource maps at regional scale by Land Resource Mapping Project (LRMP), geo-spatial technology incorporating 3s as GIS, RS and GPS were first time applied in preparation of resource mapping for local level planning by National Land Use Project (NLUP) at large scale of 1:10000
Summary
Planning process in Nepal has been initiated with the first development plan in 1956 after few years of downfall of Rana Rule, aiming of improving the wellbeing of people focusing on economic development of Nepal (Srivastava, 2008) without spatial consideration. Regional approach as a spatial dimension was introduced in national development plan only in fourthFive Year Plan(1970-1975) after realizing the fact of spatial disparity increased in socio-economic development (Gurung, 2005). It was not continued till Ninth Five-Year Plan because of sectoral coordination, lack of infrastructure development and skilled manpower integrating north-south development corridor/axis. Lack of geospatial technology application, these maps was suffered as positional inaccuracies, outdated, small scale, non-metric units of measurements and different projection systems and parameters used than the present system.
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