Status of Land Conversion and Urban Sprawling Over Coastal Tract of West Bengal: a Study on Haldia Municipality Area

Abstract

The fragile coastal areas are facing tremendous challenges in response to the recent trend of population growth and urbanization in the context of global and regional climate change and related events. The Haldia municipality area is imposed to coastal inundation and associated vulnerability as it is situated in the low-lying fragile littoral deposition of a soft sedimentary surface. The accelerated rate of flourishing urban infrastructural development ensures over the muddy surface, low-lying areas, wetland, coupled with the degradation of agricultural land and natural vegetation in conjunction with the magnitude of population growth. The haphazard urban infrastructural development leads to tidal inundation and storm rainwater logging, which also creates drainage problems in most of the urban areas. The land use and land cover (LULC) changes and landscape alteration has produced the environmental problems associated with ecosystem destruction. The six major types of LULC classifications have been done using the geospatial techniques in the four different Landsat images of 1991, 2001, 2011 and 2018. The LULC conversion has also been analyzed during 1991–2018 for the entire study area. After the establishment of the port-industry based urban centre in 1967, the urban infrastructural development concentrated over the elevated levee landscape in the IOC, Durgachack and Township areas during 1991. Afterwards, the built-up areas significantly increased in the low-lying areas of the central and western part through land-filling. The built-up area has tremendously grown from 4.72 km² to 29.36 km² during the study period, mostly occupying the agricultural land, muddy fields and vegetation areas.