Investigating the Suitability for Rice Cultivation Using Multi-Criteria Land Evaluation in the Sundarban Region of South 24 Parganas District, West Bengal, India

Proper land utilization is one of the solutions to give more food production to meet the increasing demand of the growing population all over the world. In a view of this, the current study focused on land suitability analysis for rice crop cultivation in the Sundarban region under the district of South 24 Parganas, West Bengal, which cover about 8373 km2 total geographical area. Climatic factors (temperature and rainfall) and physico-chemical properties of various alluvial soils (soil texture, pH, electrical conductivity, organic carbon content, etc.) parameters have been considered for this study. The purpose of this paper is to delimit the potential area for rice farming using multi-criterion evaluation (MCE) and GIS approaches. To address this purpose, we first determined the most effective criteria-based rice suitability map, and then, this map overlaid with the present rice cultivation map in the ArcGIS 10.1 platform. An analytical hierarchical process (AHP) has been used to rank the various suitability factors, and the resulting weight had used to construct the suitability map layers using the weighted sum overlay tool in ArcGis 10.1. Then, the suitability map has been formed for rice crop production. This potential rice cultivation area was found as follows: 126.15 km2 (3.91%) area is marginally suitable, 2096.54 km2 (64.95%) area is moderately suitable, 288.05 km2 (8.92%) area is highly suitable and 333.23 km2 (10.32%) area is not suitable regions. In the monsoon, low-lying agricultural land is filled up with water and naturally prepared for rice (Aman rice) cultivation. During the Rabi season, low water crops (barley, wheat, potato, musur, maskalai, khesari, til, mustard, linseed, and gram) are cultivated through irrigation in various parts of Sundarban, along with boro rice. It has been observed from the study that although the area is moderately fertile according to the physico-chemical properties of the soil. Therefore, economic levels of agricultural production can be met by cultivating a rice crop in highly and moderately suitable areas and diversification of marginally suitable areas for crops other than rice can be practiced which will also increase the income of marginal farmers.