Urbanisation in India, land usage pattern , derelict land

• Rapid expansion of urban areas rise in population and economic growth is causing land‐use changes. These changes are not occurring only in urban but also in rural areas and rural‐urban interface. 
• Changes are as follows: 
• • Increase in less and medium density areas in cities which include areas initially under fallow/sandy/scrub lands 
• • Decline in agriculture land, natural vegetation and waste land 
• • Shifting of wastelands to rural areas 
• • Increase in urban sprawl which refers to migration of population from populated towns and cities to low density residential development. The end result is spreading of a city and its suburbs over more and more rural land. 
• Sub‐urbanization 
• rural–urban fringe,  outskirts or urban hinterland, 
• landscape interface between town and country, or also as the transition zone where urban and rural uses mix and often clash. 
• Development of satellite cities i.e. smaller cities that are near to a large metropolitan city. 
• • As city populations grow, demand for goods and services increase, pushing up prices including that of land. As land prices rise, working/labor class may be priced out of real estate market and pushed into less desirable neighborhoods/slums, a process known as gentrification. 
• Urban heat islands which are formed when industrial and urban areas replace and reduce the amount of land covered by vegetation or open soil 
• Agricultural land near urban centres is being used to grow horticultural crops and for poultry and dairy purposes while food grains in the hinterland. 
• While urbanization is a natural corollary of industrial and economic development, unplanned‐rapid urbanization comes at certain social and ecological costs. Resulting change in land use patterns although create new opportunities but also give rise to many challenges like: 
• food security in future, 
• global warming, 
• contamination and decline of natural resources,
• health challenges 
• perpetuation of class divisions 
• rural poverty thus reinforcing further migration. 
• Hence, we need planned urbanization which should include development of satellite towns with appropriate connectivity with mega‐polis with special attention to public transport, budget housing and social infrastructure. It should be compounded with development of employment opportunities in tier 2 and 3 towns to ease metro cities, and development of agriculture, agro based industries and social infrastructure in rural areas. 

• Derelict land which has been abandoned as useless or as too badly damaged to repay a private person to improve it. They are ugly, denuded of vegetation, laced with stagnant pools of water, or covered with mine tailings or slag.
• Factors of land dereliction:‐
• in industrial and developing countries after mining and working on the land, leaving piles of tailings, dangerous pools land is abandoned.No effort is put to restore the degrading quality of land and dump wastes.
• mining operators are unwilling to spend money on rehabilitation which will give them no direct financial return.
• financial advantages of exports, employment opportunities and economic development make governments anxious to exploit mineral resources, but rehabilitation legislation is often not strict enough.
• Excessive grazing by livestock
• Lack of interest in sustainable practises of business. 
• Addressing the issue for combating the danger: –
• Existing mining companies should be forced to rehabilitate the land after it becomes uneconomic to extract the mineral. 
• Strict laws and restrictions should be imposed and enforced.
• Time‐limits on mineral exploitation could overcome such evasion.
• Force the companies to tip their wastes only in large, supervised tips, rather than in a multiplicity of small tips. In the long term this reduces the area made derelict and also allows reclamation to be carried out more easily and economically because it is concentrated in a single area.
• If land has been completely abandoned, for many years local / national government agencies should be encouraged to reclaim the land.
• Sustainable mining by Creating dedicated corridors for movement of men and machinery along with green corridor
• Madhav Gadgil committee in 2013 suggested to phase out illegal mining from western ghats to counter land degradation. This should apply in whole country.
• • Soil protection technique like soil mulching, contour bunding and soil health card for nutrition check etc. 
• Conclusion : In spite of all the difficulties, reclamation of derelict land is both possible and desirable. It can provide additional land for agriculture, for industry, for building or for other commercial purposes, parks, sports fields and other facilities for outdoor recreation. eg. old mining pools are often used for fish‐farming in Malaysia