Urbanization is an index of transformation from traditional rural economies to modern industrial one. It is a progressive concentration of population in an urban unit. It takes place either in radial direction around a well-established city or linearly along the highways. This dispersed development along highways or surrounding the city and in rural countryside is generally referred as sprawl. Sprawl is a term that is often used to describe perceived inefficiencies of development, including

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... roportionate growth of urban areas and excessive leapfrog development. Sprawl is a cumulative result of many individual decisions and it requires not only an understanding of the factors that motivate an individual landowner to convert land, but also an understanding of how these factors and individual land-use decisions aggregate over space. Some of the causes of the sprawl include-population growth, economy and proximity to resources and basic amenities. The measurement and monitoring of land-use change are crucial to government officials and planners who urgently need updated information and proper planning tools. The entropy method is most popularly used method for the measurement and monitoring of urban sprawl by the integration of remote sensing and GIS. The advantages of the entropy method are its simplicity and easy integration with GIS. GIS and remote sensing data along with collateral data help in analyzing the growth, pattern and extent of sprawl. With the spatial and temporal analyses it is possible to identify the pattern of sprawl and subsequently predict the nature of future sprawl. This project brings out the extent of sprawl taking place over a period of six years using GIS and Remote Sensing. An attempt was made to study the implications of urban sprawl on land-use & land-cover pattern of a typical regions located in Greater Hyderabad city & its surround rural-urban fringe areas in the state of Andhra Pradesh.