Urban Sprawl and Land Use / Land Cover Analysis of Sonipat City Using Remote Sensing Technology

Urban sprawl refers to the outgrowth of urban areas caused by uncontrolled, uncoordinated and unplanned growth. This outgrowth seen along the periphery of cities, along highways, and along roads connecting a city, lacks basic amenities like sanitation, treated water supply, primary health centre, etc. Sprawl generally infers to some type of uncoordinated development with impacts such as loss of agricultural land, open space and ecologically sensitive habitats in and around urban areas due to lack of integrated and holistic approaches in regional planning. Land is becoming a scarce resource due to population growth and industrialization. Land use and land cover is an important component in understanding the interactions of the human activities with the environment and thus it is necessary to be able to simulate changes. Remote sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) have been used in order to study urban sprawl and land use / land cover. The aim of this study is to detect urban sprawl between 1991 to 2011 and present land use / land cover of Sonipat city using satellite images of Landsat TM (1991), Landsat ETM+(2001), Google earth pro (2011) and digital SOI (survey of India) topographic maps.