Aparajita Dutta Banik, Arijit Roy, Monisha Hembram,
Bithin Chakraborty, Nabanita Das, Mohit Garg, Riya
Mahajan, Munmun Mondal, Asutosh Goswami

Received 19 April 2023, Accepted 12 August 2023, Published on 12 October 2023

ABSTRACT

Flood is one of the most popular natural hazards that create havoc in the society.  Flood involves inundation of a huge tract of area under water owing to heavy rainfall. Occurrence of flood lays a severe impact upon the agricultural sector. Flood not only brings about destruction of crops but also brings down the productivity of the soil. Malda district of West Bengal is not an exception in this regard. The district is one of the most flood prone districts and involves a lot of loss in crop production. The present study aims to identify the flood susceptible zones of the district through the application of Analytical Hierarchy Process and geospatial techniques and also makes an attempt to detect how much cropland falls within the very high susceptible flood prone area so that proper precautionary measures can be taken to minimize the maximum damage. The study results reveal that the western part of the district is more flood prone and about 55.27% of very high flood prone area is dominated by croplands. Hence, proper flood management techniques have to be adopted in this area to reduce the loss of production of crops owing to floods.

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Keywords    Flood susceptible zone, Analytical hierarchy process, Geospatial technique, Flood management.