Abstract

Urbanisation and sustainable development:An environmental study of Bolpur town near Tagore's santiniketan,West Bengal, India

Author(s): Piyal Basu Roy

Urbanization is a complex process of transformation that affects both people and places. It refers the concentration of people associated with non agricultural sector with land use change and rural plight i.e. population shift from rural to urban areas. Urban places of the world are therefore everincreasing in number as well as magnitude. This ever-increasing number and expansion of urban places, although reflecting index of development, bear undesirable effects on people and society and in broad sense on environmental sustainability. Since the origin of a town to its maturity, the level of environmental problems increases with its planned or unplanned growth as compared to its rural surroundings. Very often, the deplorable scenario of several first order towns and cities, metropolitan and megalopolitan cities suffering from severe environmental tribulations comes into headlines, but towns of lower order of sequence or smaller in sizes are not highlighted properly, which will face the same in the coming future. Because today’s smaller towns are tomorrow’s larger cities. So, in this circumstance, it is important to study the growth pattern of each urban area because most of the environmental problems lie in the seeds of growth or development of a town that adversely affect its natural stability. The paper focuses on the issues of sustainability emerged out due to the unending process of urbanization in Bolpur town of West Bengal and seeks some way out to reduce the problems.