Dynamics of Land Use Trends and Patterns in Uttar Pradesh: A Sectoral Perspective

 From Journal of Land and Rural Studies

Land is an invaluable resource essential for a multitude of human activities. Natural scientists define land use in terms of complexes of human activities such as agriculture, forestry and building construction that alter land surface processes, including biogeochemistry, hydrology and biodiversity. Land use and land cover change (LULCC), also known as land use change, is a general term for the human modification of Earth’s terrestrial surface. Land use is a product of interactions between cultural backgrounds, state and physical needs of the society with the natural potential of land.

LULCC is one of those major challenges that affect the natural landscape. It is one of the main driving forces of global environmental change and central to the sustainable development debate. These include its impact on water quality, land and air resources, ecosystem processes and function and climate, biodiversity, soil degradation and the ability of natural systems to support life.

The changes in land use affect the ecosystem of an area in terms of vegetation, local weather effects, land quality itself and the quality of life that can be sustained. However, rapid pace of economic development along with population growth, urbanisation and industrialisation exert tremendous pressure on the limited natural resource base of a country.

Like other developing countries, most of the population of India live in rural areas and depend directly or indirectly on the land for their sustenance. This population in rural areas is now increasing rapidly, and its results may have effects on the very dynamics of land use and other resources also. India is the second largest populated country in the world after China but scarce in land resource. India’s population reached about 121 crore during 2011, which shares about 17% of the world population while land share is about 2.4%.

In Uttar Pradesh, land has been going through tremendous transformations because of changes in land use due to increasing population, industrialisation and urbanisation. Uttar Pradesh is the most populated state in the country, but the land resource is scanty as compared to the other states. In 2011, population of this state was 20 crore, which accounts about 16.16% of the Indian population, while the per capita availability of land is about 0.13 hectares which is very less. Maitima et al. (2009) noted that the land cover changes have transferred to farmlands, grazing lands, human settlements and urban centres at the expansion of natural vegetation. These changes also show linkages with biodiversity loss and land degradation which indicates that as native vegetation is lost, indigenous plant and animal biodiversity and plant cover are also lost. 

Land use is an important parameter for numbers of agricultural and ecological models which organise significant tools for development, planning and management of the natural resources in the region. Better land management involves identifying ecological benefits and costs that arise from land use practices as well as finding the best alternatives for each area. There are broad differences in the distribution and utilisation of land resources over different districts of the state, based on topographic, geographical, political and other factors. Therefore, an understanding of the land use dynamics and their ecological implications in Uttar Pradesh would be of immense help.

This study made an attempt to understand the dynamics of trends and patterns of land use in Uttar Pradesh, as it is directly or indirectly associated with their living. The study largely focused on three sectors for analysing this status: ecological, agricultural and non-agricultural. It primarily focused on the secondary sources of data, incorporating various government publications from 2000 to 2015. Multiple linear regression technique was executed to examine the scenario of sectoral land use and to find the determinants of land use changes. The findings of this study reveal that the growth rates of different categories of land use have witnessed declining trends except for the area under non-agricultural land use. Whereas enviable ecological sector is passing through a critical phase of land transformation as the area under forest is declining along with pastures and miscellaneous trees. It also points out considerable decrease for net sown area in agricultural sector but increase for current fallow land.