Population explosion and land use changes in Gurgaon City, a satellite of Delhi

Rupesh Gupta, Student
Sudesh Nangia, Jawaharlal Nehru University

This paper is the case study of a town named Gurgaon in the urban shadow zone of capital city of India, Delhi, in terms of its population explosion and land use changes. The population of Gurgaon has grown from 57 thousand in 1971 to 1.74 lakh in 2001. The growth rate has also indicated an increasing trend. In addition, the pressure of continuously growing metropolitan city is also changing the structure of the town and its surrounding neighborhood. In this paper, the authors have tried to investigate the changes in land use pattern of Gurgaon region that have occurred over the past few decades, and have tried to associate them with population growth, urbanization and industrialization of the countryside. For this purpose, Multi-temporal Satellite data and GIS tool are used. Urban land use mapping was carried out using multi-temporal data from 1993 to 2002 & topographical maps for the year1971.