Urban Sprawls and Land Use Change analysis of Karnal City: Using Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques

Urban sprawls are transition zones with indefinite borders between rural and urban areas. Many factors cause urban sprawl such as population increase, socio-economic factors, technological development and development policies. This surface has been recording changes throughout geological times but with recent rapid urban expansion this change has been occurring at a much faster rate. This change needs to be detected, mapped and measured at frequent intervals so that we can have real time information on it. The study area Karnal is an agricultural-industrial district in the north-central part of Haryana. It has become synonymous with the National Highway 44 (NH-44), which is popularly known as GT Karnal Road (Grand Trunk Karnal Road). Present paper has tried to find out the changes which have taken place in landscape of Karnal City in Haryana from 2000-2021. Study has used open-source satellite images of Landsat data downloaded from www.glovis.usgs.gov/. Besides satellite images Toposheet No 53 C/14 (Survey of India) and guide map of Karnal city has been used for ancillary information. The objective of study has been to find out the pattern of sprawl of Karnal city and changes in land use from 1990-2020. Supervised classification using ISODATA algorithm has been carried out for land use classification. Further the change in these categories from 2000-2021 has been measured and mapped Software’s like ERDAS IMAGINE 9.0, ARC GIS 10.1 and MS OFFICE 2007 have been used. Sprawl of the city has taken place in two main areas. One is area between Delhi-Ambala main railway track and National Highway No.44. Secondly it has spread along National Highway No.44 in the eastern part of the city. The study has found that major change in land use has taken place in urban built and crop/vegetation land.