Monitoring Urban Growth and Detection of Land Use/ Land Cover Change in Silchar City, Assam and Balurghat City, West Bengal

Abstract

Rapid growth and development of urban area is a worldwide phenomenon and it has become one of the certain issues facing by most of the urban areas in developing countries like India. The foremost reasons of this type of speedy growth are uncontrolled urbanisation coupled with accelerated population growth, massive influx of illegal immigrants and unorganized expansion of the urban areas. Accordingly, urban growth led to radical changes in land-use/ land-cover, which manifests profound impact on urban environment through the process of fast alteration of natural landscapes. In this context, the present study aims at comparing the pattern of urban growth and concerning land use and land cover change dynamics of two emerging frontier cities in India i.e., Silchar and Balurghat. For the purpose of the study, multi-temporal Landsat data have been used for analysing land use/ land cover changes in both cities for the period of 1988-2019.Hence, land use and land cover maps are prepared by applying maximum likelihood algorithm of supervised classification method with the help of ERDAS Imagine software. The accuracy assessment was also done by applying statistical method of Kappa coefficient. Further, the study reveals that both the cities have experienced with rapid rate of horizontal expansion. This has led to drastic change with sharpe conversion of vegetation and open field to built-up areas and which have caused innumerable environmental problems and hampers the sustainable growth of both two cities. Therefore, there has been dire need for proper planning to sustain balance of future urban growth and overall development of the areas.