Overview |
Urban Sprawl |
Fringe Area Development |
Urban Agglomeration |
Emerging Technologies |
Relevant Links
Monitoring the Physical Growth of Mandya City: Using GPS
Results & Discussions Average urban development and increasing land use changes due to changing population and economic growth in Mandya city’s landscape is being witnessed of late. Forest cover and rural agricultural land is being converted into urban purposes in all around the city. Since Mandya has shown a typical urbanization, industrialization and improvement in information technology sector there is an increasing pressure on land, water and environment. Planners need the whole data and information of a map and information related to these aspects for perspective planning and management at the edge of Mandya city. Hence, there is need to create an information system of Mandya city to retrieve, integrate and create various planning scenarios for decision making. The Global Positioning System (GPS), Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) are appropriate tools for creating such type of information system. There is a demand to constantly monitor such changes and understand the processes for taking effective and corrective measures towards a planned and healthy development of Mandya city. Recently, GPS and Remote sensing data are being widely used for mapping and monitoring of urban spread especially in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, Channai etc. Hence, the same technology and data can be used for Mandya city for the spatial patterns of urban expansion over different time periods and can be systematically mapped, monitored and accurately assessed from satellite data along with conventional ground data. Land loss has become a problem in Mandya City of Karnataka state. The most productive farmland is being lost by urban encroachments into rural land over the past thirty years. The unchecked physical expansion and population of Mandya city has resulted in agricultural land loss around the city. Space is limited inside the city, but multifaceted demands for space kept shooting up. In order to meet the space requirements, village lands are annexed by the main city. This consumed the cultivated and vegetated lands from the villages surrounded by Mandya city and internal land structure of the city has also been changed. These changes in the city have not planned hence led to a haphazard development, which in turn yielded problems for the proper functioning of Mandya city. The city exhibits common problems to varying degrees, which include inadequate housing, economic decline, poverty, slums, over-crowding, ill-health, social polarization, traffic congestion and environmental pollution, etc. Growth of any city is a good sign of development, but the way the expansion takes place calls for concern.   In the context of urban land, one of the land use issue, which has become of prime concern in recent times is the concern about the loss of prime agricultural land due to the physical expansion due to Mandya city's growth is seen curbing smaller villages on the periphery gulping fertile agricultural lands. Uncontrolled and unauthorized urban developments have also taken place without having basic civic amenities on the city periphery physical expansion of cities. An estimated 85 acres of land is being used each year, which by and large mainly comes from agriculture, forest cover and lakes. Most fundamentally, the character of urban environments throughout the world is the outcome of interactions among a host of environmental, economic, technological, social, demographic, cultural and political forces operating at a variety of geographic scales raging from the global to the local. Hence, Cities growth and developments are to be mapped, stored and displayed so as to understand whether they are maintaining sustainability or not. The same is applicable to Mandya city as well.  Fig: 4. Mandya City Map Using GPS (2005) During the study period, the city experienced the positive growth rate in area as well as population. The area of the city increased from 1497.60 to 4470.36 and almost it is tripled within the span of 3.5 decades. Totally, Mandya city engulfed 2972.76 acres of agricultural land from its periphery. On the other side, the population of the city grew from 72132 in 1971 to 135650 in 2005 showing 63518 hikes within a span of 35 years. The city has encroached lots of precious agricultural land, forest land and lake areas during the study period.
Expansion of Mandya city brings a number of problems of housing, infrastructure, services and loss of agricultural land. These problems require immediate attention of the planners and administrators. Following are the suggestions which are to be given keen interest for sustainable growth and balance of Mandya city.
References
Page 3 of 3
| Previous | |