Current World Environment

Opencast coal mining has an immense impact on the changing land use and land cover pattern of any colliery belt. This is the main thrust of the present study. Land-use practices, like built-up area, cropland, vegetation, water body, bare land, mining area etc. have been identified. The pattern of changing land use and land cover in the Mangalpur private opencast colliery has been analysed. At the same time, entire Raniganj block has been studied with the help of secondary data. SOI Topographic map 73^M/₂ has been used to show the situation of collieries both underground and opencast of Raniganj block in 1967. The land use and land cover changes in the Raniganj block have been analysed for 12 years i.e., from the year 2007 to 2019 using remote sensing techniques. The changes have been detected at 6 year time gap. For that purpose Landsat-5 TM, Landsat-8 OLI/ TIRS satellite images are used. Apart from that, the quantification of spatio-temporal dynamics of land use and land cover patterns are also examined by supervised image classification. The study exposed that extend of the mining area and the bare land area has increased in 2019 compared to 2007. On the contrary, cropland and vegetation cover have decreased significantly during the period under study. To achieve sustainable use of land in the study area, some management procedures have been discussed at the end