Impact of Summer Rice Cultivation on Ground Water in Pilibhit District, Uttar Pradesh, India

Every year a huge amount of ground water pumped in Pilibhit district due to summer rice cultivation, causing depletion in water table. Remote Sensing and GIS techniques provide an advance and reliable information regarding the area sown under summer rice. The present study focused on the identification of area under summer rice cultivation in different years and its impact on ground water level. The Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Sentinel-2A satellite data were used to identify the area under summer rice. In the present study, the summer rice area estimation were done for the year 2012-2013, 2013-2014, 2014-2015, 2015-2016, 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 and as such, the rice area were estimated around 28667.08 ha, 29607.84 ha, 30382.62 ha, 31728.89 ha, 32675.38ha 32313.27 ha respectively. The cultivation of summer rice in above years (2012-2013 to 2017-2018) consumed around 10033478³ m, 10362744³ m, 10633917³ m, 11105111.5³ m, 11436383³ m and 11309644.5³ m of water respectively. The source of this huge amount of water is mainly ground water, which results in 2 to 3 feet depletion of water table in last decade and if this continues in future, the district of pilibhit will surely be faced severe scarcity of ground water.