Carrying-capacity as a basis for sustainable development a case study of National Capital Region in India

The concept and premises of carrying-capacity are employed as tools for the operationalization of sustainable development. Carrying-capacity of a region, comprising its supportive and assimilative capacities, is defined as the ability to produce desired outputs from a constrained resource base to achieve a higher and more equitable quality of life, while maintaining desired environmental quality, and ecological health. The proposed planning process explicitly includes interaction between the community, experts and decision-makers to arrive at trade-offs between the desired production-consumption levels through the exploitation of supportive capacity within its regenerative potential, and environmental quality within the assimilative capacity of the regional ecosystem. These trade-offs result in structural shifts necessary for reconciling competing demands in the overall process of socio-economic development through appropriate technological, managerial and organizational interventions. RDBMS-Neural Network-based system has been used for on-line consequence analysis of regional developmental proposals. The model outputs are used as the indicators of sustainable development. The neural networks have been trained to identify linkages in regional systems and the cartographic inputs have been processed through GIS to obtain spatial data, and through RDBMS to obtain non-spatial data. ploratory search to identify a preferred scenario considers settlement forms; locations of developmental activities; technological options; and consumption patterns. The preferred scenario maximizes the equitable quality of life levels, and minimizes ecological loading and environmental degradation index. The case of carrying-capacity-based developmental planning in National Capital Region (NCR) in India is presented.