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India is bestowed with the bounty of natural resources including minerals, soils, water and forests. The urban population pressure has led to spatial and hazardous growth of urban centres into peripheral agricultural lands. Such changes in land use/land cover have resulted in a serious environmental degradation, namely soil erosion by water and wind, salinization and/or
alkalinization, waterlogging, etc. For ensuring food security, fertile land needs to be prevented from degradation and degraded land may to be brought under cultivation after reclamation. In fact, India needs to produce about 100 million tones of additional food grains by 2020.
Towards realizing this goal, an additional 38 million ha of watersheds are targeted to be treated in the rain fed regions during the 11th Five year plan. Information on extent and spatial distribution of agricultural land assumes greater significance in the context of ensuring food security. Traditional methods of reporting Net Sown Area
(NSA) have a lag time of 3 years and do not provide spatially explicit information. Similarly, forest cover monitoring system provides information on forest cover biennially with a lag of 4 years. Timely and reliable information on spatial distribution, intra and inter annual changes in cropping systems, forest cover, surface water bodies and snow cover is a pre-requisite for land use planning, and is a valuable input to global change studies and climatological models.
By virtue of synoptic coverage at regular intervals, spaceborne multi-spectral measurements hold immense potential in providing timely and reliable information on LULC of an area/region.Since it’s the inception, Department of Space with a meticulously planned earth observation mission has been providing remote sensing data to user community within the country or across the world for management of natural resources and environment. Resourcesat-1 with a combination of three sensors i.e., Advanced Wide Field Sensor (AWiFS), Linear Imaging Self-scanning Sensor (LISS-III and LISS-IV) offers a unique opportunity to generate information on natural resources at regional, macro and micro level.
In order to make the spatial information on natural resources available to user community, the Department of Space, Govt. of India has launched a programme titled "National Natural Resources Repository (NRR)". The NRR consists of data generation, database organization and spatial data services. The natural Resources Census (NRC) project addresses the database generation element of NRR. The NRC envisages generating spatial information on (i) Land use / land cover (ii) Land degradation (iii) Soils (iv) Geomorphology (v) snow cover or glaciers (vi) wetland and (vii) vegetation cover at 1:50000 scale using high resolution satellite data. LULC assessment on 1:250,000 has been taken up as part this programme to provide rapid assessment for LULC to understand and assess intra and inter annual changes. The project focuses on generating information on kharif cropped area at the end of the season and to prepare LULC map at the end of each year since 2004-2005 crop year. The study has been completed for 3 crop years 2004-05, 2005-06, 2006-07 and 4th assessment 2007-08 is in progress.
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