European Geographical Studies, 2019, 6(1) 21 Copyright © 2019 by Academic Publishing House Researcher s.r.o. Published in the Slovak Republic European Geographical Studies Has been issued since 2014. E-ISSN: 2413-7197 2019, 6(1): 21-38 DOI: 10.13187/egs.2019.1.21 www.ejournal9.com A Comprehensive Assessment of Land Use and Land Cover in Lateritic terrain through Remote Sensing and GIS in West Bengal Sudipa Halder a , Malabika Biswas Roy b , Pankaj Kumar Roy a , * a Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India b Women’s College, Calcutta, India Abstract Climate change is an important consequence of the land degradation. There is an urgent need to manage the rapidly changing dynamicity of the earth surface in a sustainable way. Garbeta block of West Medinipore has been chosen for the study to identify the sources of landform vulnerability which is severely affected by rill and gully erosion. Land use and land cover analysis of three distinct years has been computed which clearly shows the increase of dry fallow land over the region from 1989 to 2018 making it more assailable to sheet and rill erosion during the monsoonal period and encourage poor ground water recharge. An association map between land use/land cover and elevation has been prepared using GIS software and Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS) to find out the dominancy and similarity of a particular physical and human activities over the region according to the relief. The environmental indices like Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) has been prepared to analyse the ecological stability of the region. Therefore land use and land cover analysis is an important tool for the policy makers and stakeholders to implement conservation schemes in the light of sustainability. Keywords: water stress, Multiple Correspondence, Kappa statistics, NDVI, NDWI. 1. Introduction Land use and land cover assessment is one of the most important tool of quantifying and qualifying the earth surface equilibrium. The dynamicity of the frequent landform configuration can be easily monitored by applying this methodology. Environmental degradation together with alarming rate of population growth has been modifying our valuable land resources since its birth. Human induced land use and land cover change has brought far reach implications on the climate change by instigating the global carbon cycle and increase of atmospheric CO2 to a greater limit. According to Xiao et al. (Xiao et al., 2006: 322) land use and land cover switch play major role in global climate change through its interaction with ecosystem and ecology. This change can be detected and investigated by the amalgamated methodology of remote sensing and Geographical Information System (GIS) (Wu et al., 2006: 322). In order to monitor the change in large areas accurate and effective mapping techniques can be used and that can be done using remotely sensed images like Landsat ETM + and Landsat 8 OLI (Mas, 2004: 219). Ravines or the regions of irregular terrains are crisscrossed by numerous rills and gullies like that of the west Bengal Rarh plain which * Corresponding author E-mail addresses: pk1roy2014@gmail.com (P. Kumar Roy)