How to drown a state

{ONE}

FOR SEVERAL DAYS IN SEPTEMBER, Sukhdev Singh returned each morning to find only water where his fields once stood. The lengthening stalks of maize and paddy, sown with borrowed money, had been flattened into sludge. His father and a nephew died some days before the floods, but the family could not perform their last rites—the floods swept through Singh’s kothi, destroyed nine hectares of his paddy fields and left his high-yielding cows ailing, with no fodder to eat. He was already reeling under an agricultural loan of around thirty lakh rupees and a dairy loan. “I lost my entire crop in the 2023 floods too,” he told me, gesturing towards his sludge-smudged house and muddy kitchen utensils. The family had taken refuge in a relative’s house, some distance away from their own in Ghonewal, in Amritsar’s Ramdas subdivision.

This year’s flood ravaged more than twenty-six hundred villages across all 23 districts in the state, displacing over six hundred eighty thousand people from their homes. It flattened or inundated close to two hundred thousand hectares of farmland, killing 55 people and injuring countless others. On witnessing bunds crack and tear like sheets of paper, people across the state scrambled to save life and limb. In some places along the rivers, the water cut like a knife through low-level embankments. In others, people abandoned entire villages and temporarily moved to relief camps. As the waters began to recede, they were left counting their dead and drowned livestock and assessing the damage to their wrecked homes and submerged crops. The Punjab government’s initial estimate, on 6 September, pegged losses from the flood at over Rs 13,500 crores, with its water resources minister stating that the number is expected to climb as the floodwater recedes further to reveal the full extent of damage.

In recent years, every time there has been a heavy monsoon, Punjab’s farmers have found themselves at its mercy. But this year’s disaster was not inevitable, nor was it unpredictable. The flood was a “manmade disaster,” according to Hardip Singh Kingra, a former vice-chairperson of the National Environmental Appraisal Committee (Hydroelectric and River Valley Projects) and a retired additional secretary in the union government. “It can be proved beyond doubt,” he wrote to me, “that recent floods in Punjab are the result of excessive and untimely release of water” from the storage dams and barrages that sit on Punjab’s four rivers—the Beas, the Ravi, the Sutlej and the Ghaggar. When the worst of the flood hit, from 27 August to 5 September this year, all four were in spate, flowing above their danger marks and breaching bunds built for flood control along their course. Indeed, serving officials in the Punjab government and the official documents I accessed, confirmed Kingra’s assessment that the floods could have been avoided if the union and state governments had acted with care and precision.