Monitoring Urban Growth and Land Use Change with Geospatial Techniques in Varanasi District, Uttar Pradesh, India

The cities are growing in all directions resulting in urban sprawl, and it is governed by geographic and socio-economic factors such as population growth, policy and economic development. The uncontrolled momentum of urban sprawl and land use change raises many issues which might have both positive and negative impacts. This sprawl can be adequately monitored using remotely sensed data from different dates by digital analysis of the imagery using change detection techniques. The present study aims to examine the change in demography, land use /land cover (LU/LC) over a time point and assesses the pattern of sprawl through GIS technique of Varanasi city. The geographical area is 1535 sq.km including 1,371.22 km² rural area and 163.78 km² urban area. Varanasi has a population of 36, 76,841 persons in 2011. There are 5, 60,162 houses in the district. It consists of 8 blocks. The spatio-temporal study of LU/LC is carried out for two-time points 1990and 2016. The data source used for analysis is Landsat MSS and Landsat OLI. The analysis mainly focused the urban growth along with land use/ landcover changes using digital image processing techniques like Maximum Likelihood Classifier algorithm for Supervised Classification and NDVI vegetation index. The trend of sprawl is notably high in the urban centers than in the revenue villages.