Evaluating Land Use and Land Cover Transformation Through Remote Sensing: A Study of the Purandar Lift Irrigation Area

The Purandar Lift Irrigation Scheme was started to reduce water scarcity in the semi-arid Purandar taluka, which lies between the Mula-Mutha and Nira rivers in Pune District, Maharashtra. This area gets low and unpredictable rainfall, usually between 400 to 600 mm, making water management a serious issue. The scheme covers four talukas—Purandar, Haveli, Daund, and Baramati—and includes several villages. This study focuses on change anyalses in land use and land cover (LULC) from the year 2005 to 2023 to understand how the irrigation project has affected the region over time.To determine LULC change detection, Remote Sensing and GIS techniques were used, with Landsat 7 Enchanced Thematic Mapper (ETM) and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Thermal Infrared (TIRS) satellite images as the main data source. The Maximum Likelihood Classification (MLC) method was used for supervised classification, and the Kappa coefficient was used to check the accuracy of the results. The anaylsis identify major changes in the landscape, especially a decrease in barren land by 8% and other class shows an increase in agricultural land and Built-up Area.These changes suggest that the irrigation scheme has been successful in improving water availability for farming and other uses. The results highlight the importance of tracking LULC changes to evaluate how well such irrigation projects work and how sustainable they are in the long run. This research gives useful information that can help improve water resource planning and management in the region.