Urbanization and the Decline of Agricultural Land in Pokhara Sub-metropolitan City, Nepal

Pokhara Sub-Metropolitan City is one of the rapidly urbanizing cities of Nepal. This piece of writing analyzes the urbanization trend and transition of cultivated land in Pokhara in the time period of 1977, 1990, 1999 and 2010. Large amount of cultivated land has been transformed into other landuse classes, mainly to urban, in the past 33 years. This paper presents the process of the continuous loss of agricultural land and urban development in Pokhara by utilizing remote sensing and GIS which concludes that urbanization and high population rise as the vital agents behind the loss of farmland of the area. Landsat satellite image have been used for the analysis of land use/land cover change. Supervised image classification has been applied to classify the images to different land use categories. Six land use classes are identified- Urban (Built-up), water body, open field, forest cover, cultivated land and sandy area. Urban and industrial areas are very much enlarged and cultivated and open field area considerably decreased during the study periods 1977 to 2010. In 1977, urban area had covered 6.33% but it increased to 51.42% in 2010 whereas cultivated land had decreased from 60.73% to 20.27% in same period.