Guest Column| Punjab on brink: From myths, misgovernance to reforms

For years, a troubling narrative has echoed through political corridors and public discourse, that Punjab, a state grappling with acute water stress, is unwilling to share its waters with Haryana and is irresponsibly letting Indian river water flow into Pakistan. While politically expedient, this storyline is scientifically flawed and misleading. It obscures the hydrological realities, ecological fragility, and structural constraints shaped by outdated policies and international treaties.

Punjab is confronting an unprecedented water emergency. Once a key pillar of the Green Revolution, the state’s agricultural success has come at an ecological cost. According to the Central Ground Water Board’s 2022 report, 117 of Punjab’s 150 administrative blocks are over-exploited, meaning groundwater extraction far exceeds natural recharge. In Sangrur, Patiala, and Bathinda districts, the water table is falling by over a metre a year, rendering shallow aquifers increasingly inaccessible.

Compounding this crisis is the decline in surface water availability. Punjab’s three primary rivers, the Sutlej, Ravi, and Beas, have become largely seasonal, swelling only during the monsoon when irrigation demand is low. During the critical rabi and kharif cropping seasons, these rivers often run dry, forcing agriculture to rely on groundwater. The monsoon surge that does arrive often flows downstream, sometimes into Pakistan, not by political choice but due to insufficient storage infrastructure.

Storage paradox

Punjab lacks the physical capacity to regulate or retain monsoon surpluses. This is the result not only of policy neglect but also of ecological and geographical constraints.

Studies by the Central Water Commission and Punjab’s irrigation department indicate that most feasible sites for large dams or reservoirs have either been exhausted or are unviable due to terrain limitations, ecological sensitivity, and population density. Given the flat topography of the state and the high socio-environmental costs of displacement, large-scale additional storage infrastructure is no longer economically or environmentally viable.

As a result, unutilised monsoon flows crossing into Pakistan are not an outcome of policy indifference, but a structural limitation.

In villages of southwestern Punjab, including districts of Mansa, Bathinda, and Faridkot, farmers speak of deepening despair. Borewells have dried up. Repeated drilling yields brackish or unsafe sub-soil water. Canal flows are inconsistent, leading to water insecurity. The situation in central Punjab is no different. These conditions are driving a new wave of agrarian distress and rural migration, contributing to a near-systemic collapse of the agricultural economy.

SYL Canal debate

The longstanding controversy over the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) Canal continues to dominate regional politics. However, the root of the conflict lies not in Punjab’s refusal to cooperate, but in the flawed hydrological assumptions behind historical water allocations.

The 1976 central notification, which allotted 3.5 million acre-feet (MAF) of water to Haryana, was not based on updated scientific assessments. The 1981 tripartite agreement between Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan similarly failed to account for groundwater depletion, population growth, and climate variability.

Despite these limitations, Punjab receives only a fraction of the flows originating from its rivers. Substantial volumes are diverted to Haryana, Rajasthan, and Delhi, while Punjab bears the disproportionate ecological burden of embankment maintenance, basin management, flood control, and canal desilting — costs often overlooked in national discourse.

The Punjab assembly has consistently opposed the SYL Canal’s construction, citing ecological fragility and the absence of surplus water. The Punjab Termination of Agreements Act, 2004, though later reviewed unfavorably by the Supreme Court, remains a powerful assertion: The state cannot share what it no longer has.

The recurring claim that Punjab lets water flow to Pakistan instead of Indian states misrepresents the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), signed in 1960 and brokered by the World Bank. The treaty allocates the eastern rivers, the Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej, to India, and the western rivers, the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab, to Pakistan.

While India holds full rights over the eastern rivers, seasonal overflow during the monsoon, when storage is unfeasible, may cross the border. These flows are not political choices, they are hydraulic outcomes bound by geography and treaty obligations. The Indus Water Treaty surely needs to be reviewed in view of changed hydrological, ecological and geo-political conditions.

Failing framework

Punjab’s crisis reflects not merely state-level failure but a broader breakdown of national water governance. Rarely does an inter-state water dispute in the country get settled amicably or judicially and conclusively.

Despite knowing that Punjab cannot build new reservoirs, there has been no coordinated federal effort to develop upstream storage infrastructure in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, or Jammu and Kashmir, where the topography is more suitable. These dams, if built, could regulate monsoon flows and provide buffer storage for downstream states, including Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan.

Instead, the national conversation remains mired in blame games and state-versus-state confrontations, undermining opportunities for shared, science-based solutions.

Innovation, federal cooperation

Solving Punjab’s water crisis demands institutional innovation and federal cooperation. Key recommendations include:

*Establishing a river basin authority under constitutional provisions to enable integrated basin planning and modelling; transparent, satellite-based water accounting; ecological flow assessments; and independent conflict resolution mechanisms.

*Launching a national Himalayan storage mission, with targeted investment in upstream dams, environmental safeguards, and benefit-sharing frameworks involving Punjab and other riparian states.

*Negotiating a bargain between Punjab and the Centre, under which the state accelerates its shift from water-intensive paddy (underway in parts of Doaba and Malwa); the Centre guarantees procurement of alternative crops; investment in micro-irrigation technologies (drip and sprinkler systems); and farmers receive financial and technical transition support.

The myth that Punjab is hoarding water or prioritising Pakistan over fellow Indian states must be decisively laid to rest. It is a dangerous distraction from the real issue: A national crisis of water governance, compounded by scientific neglect, institutional inertia, and political myopia.

Punjab is not the problem, it is a symptom of a broken system. Solving its water crisis will require not just engineering solutions, but a new political imagination, one that treats water not as a political weapon, but as a shared, finite, and sacred national resource. sureshkumarnangia@gmail.com

The writer is a retired Punjab IAS officer. Views expressed are personal.