Monitoring Urban Sprawl Using Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques of a Fast Growing Urban Centre, India

India's urban population has grown tremendously in the last four decades from 79 million in 1961 to 285 million in 2001. This fast rate of increase in urban population is mainly due to large scale migration of people from rural and smaller towns to bigger cities in search of better employment opportunities and good life style. This rapid population pressure has resulted in unplanned growth in the urban areas to accommodate these migrant people which in turn leads to urban sprawl. It is a growing problematic aspect of metropolitan and bigger city's growth and development in recent years in India. Urban sprawl has resulted in loss of productive agricultural lands, open green spaces, loss of surface water bodies and depletion of ground water. Therefore, there is a need to study, understand and quantify the urban sprawl. In this paper an attempt has been made to use Shannon's entropy model to assess urban sprawl using IRS P-6 data and topographic sheet in GIS environment for one of the fastest growing city of South India and its surrounding area. The built-up area of the city has increased from 135 km(2) in 1971 to 370 km(2) in 2005. The study shows that there is a remarkable urban sprawl in and around the twin city between 1971 and 2005 because 215 km(2) of agricultural land has lost to built-up land during this period. As a result the urban ecosystem has changed in the last four decades.