Understanding the growth dynamics of urban agglomerations is essential for ecologically feasible developmental planning. The inefficient and consumptive use of land and its associated resources is termed sprawl. By monitoring changes in the urban sprawl over a period of time, the impact of changing land use on land, ecology and environment system can be assessed.

The aim of this paper is to develop a methodology for estimating flood risk, considering Noida as a case study. This paper examines the impact of different methods for estimating impervious surface cover on the prediction of peak discharges as determined by a fully distributed rainfall-runoff model (WetSpa). The study of River Yamuna and Hindon basin area shows detailed information on the spatial distribution of impervious surfaces, as obtained/calibrated from remotely sensed data.

The right to the city, an idea mooted by French radical philosophers in 1968, has become a popular slogan among right to housing activists and inclusive growth policymakers. In Indian cities unprecedented and unregulated growth, incremental land use change, privatisation and chaotic civic infrastructure provisioning are fracturing resources created over centuries and reducing the right to the city to mere right to housing and property, thus short-changing the concept’s transformative potential.

This article traces the shifting visibility of the river Yamuna in the social and ecological imagination of Delhi. It delineates how the riverbed has changed from being a neglected “non-place” to prized real estate for private and public corporations. It argues that the transformation of an urban commons into a commodity is not only embedded in processes of political economy, but is also driven by aesthetic sensibilities that shape how ecological landscapes are valued.

Urbanisation in India is occurring at a rate that is faster compared to many other parts of the developing world. The Planning Commission of the Government of India estimates that about 40 per cent of the country’s population will be residing in urban areas by 2030.

The traditional practice of utilizing wastewater into fish pond is a unique example of sustainable socio-economic development pertaining to resource recovery in the Eastern Kolkata wetlands, a Ramsar site in India. This paper revealed the stress of urban pollution and poor land use planning on the world’s largest natural wetland. This is the first time to critically evaluate dynamics of oxygen demanding substances, nutrients and solids in waste water canal and fish ponds.

While Indian cities have grown manifold in the past several decades, and there is expectation that the pace of urbanization would accelerate in the future, problems of water supply, sewage disposal, municipal wastes, power supply, open landscaped spaces, air pollution, and public transport, have assumed stark proportions in many urban areas.

The Bagmati loses its way in Kathmandu amid political vacuum and urban chaos. The chaos and urban sprawl of today’s Kathmandu have taken a serious toll on the stretch of the Bagmati and its tributaries that meet in the city. In the absence of clear guidelines regulating river water use and diversion, the city extracts some 30 million litres of water each day from this seasonal river to quench its thirst, even in the dry season.

Aditya Batra in conversation with Keshab Sthapit, a mayor famous for muscling his way to urban renewal.

The paper attempts a stock taking of urbanization in the post colonial period in India and critically examines the scenarios projected by international and national agencies.

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