Expansion or over growth of Municipal Area: A Case Study of Burdwan Municipality, Burdwan District, West Bengal, India

Burdwan Municipality is one of the emerging urban centre in West Bengal and also running in the phase of land dynamics. This phenomenon, leads to large scale unplanned growth with uneven pattern of land use in the study area. The town has drastically increased its area and population size from 1970, this results development of Municipal area in the fringe regions as well as rural counterparts. This paper aims to analyze whether this development is an expansion or unplanned overgrowth. So, the author have used the Land use data, topographical map, satellite image with supervised classification of Maximum Likelihood Method to identify the temporal change of municipal area. Then a map also prepared to show the municipal boundary in different time periods by using Geographical Information System.