Floods in Punjab cannot merely be described as natural calamities, because in reality, they are manmade disasters created due to years of negligence, corruption, and poor planning. Punjab is a land of five rivers, yet instead of being a blessing, these rivers have often been turned into instruments of destruction because successive governments have failed to invest in proper water management, drainage systems, and flood control infrastructure. The absence of long-term planning, lack of maintenance of embankments, and failure to desilt canals and rivers regularly have made Punjab highly vulnerable to even moderate rains.
One of the biggest manmade reasons behind Punjab’s recurring floods is the poor management of dams and barrages. These dams, instead of protecting the state from floods, often act as “water bombs” because of the sudden and unplanned release of excess water. When reservoirs are mismanaged, and water is released without prior warning or preparation, the villages and towns downstream are submerged within hours, leaving people with no time to save their crops, homes, or livestock. This shows that the floods are not a natural outcome of heavy rainfall alone but a direct result of reckless mismanagement.
Encroachment and unregulated construction along riverbanks have further worsened the crisis. Politically connected land mafias have been allowed to raise illegal structures, narrowing the natural flow of rivers and blocking drainage channels. Moreover, urban expansion without proper sewage and Stormwater planning has turned cities into flood-prone zones. Even the rural areas are not spared, as the traditional drainage system has been destroyed, leaving villages at the mercy of overflowing rivers and canals.
Another manmade aspect of these floods is linked to corruption and inefficiency. Year after year, huge amounts are allocated for flood prevention and water management, yet very little is visible on the ground. Embankments remain weak, flood protection projects are left incomplete, and funds vanish without accountability. When disaster strikes, the authorities are quick to blame nature, while in truth it is their own apathy that drowns the people of Punjab.
Therefore, it is wrong to call Punjab’s floods “natural disasters.” These are in fact engineered tragedies caused by human greed, administrative failure, and short-sighted policies. Unless Punjab receives genuine attention in terms of water management reforms, transparent use of funds, strict control over encroachments, and scientific flood-prevention planning, the state will continue to suffer manmade floods every few years.
Punjab’s people have stood at the country’s front line for generations—on the borders in wartime, in the fields during the Green Revolution, in micro-enterprises and global trade, in sport and the armed forces, and in the remittance economy that supports families and philanthropy at home. Yet, paradoxically, Punjab often experiences a back-of-the-queue reality when it comes to institutional respect, equitable resource allocation, and policy voice. The sense of discrimination is not a slogan; it is the cumulative effect of how water, power, capital and administrative control have been structured over time. From questions around the Bhakra Beas Management Board (BBMB) to the long, unfinished story of Chandigarh, from canal command to aquifer collapse, Punjab’s predicament is that it bears frontline risk while too often being denied frontline rights.
The BBMB case is emblematic. The headworks, dams and canals it oversees are not abstractions; they are concrete assets built and maintained at high cost in a geography that shoulders real flood risk when spates arrive at night and embankments are tested by furious flows. Over the years, governance changes and appointment norms have steadily diluted Punjab’s operational primacy over assets physically located within or contiguous to its territory. At the same time, water and power benefits continue to flow across state lines without a matching framework for risk-sharing or cost recovery. The result is a structural imbalance: Punjab acts as the custodian of assets and first responder to failure, while a significant share of the economic rents created by those assets is realized elsewhere.
Chandigarh, meanwhile, sits at the nexus of symbolism and administration. A capital is not merely office space; it is the civic anchor of a state’s identity and a nerve center for policy delivery. The unresolved status of Chandigarh—even decades after reorganization—has sustained a constitutional anomaly that would be unthinkable in most federations: a state capital not fully under that state’s control. The continuing limbo erodes public trust and fuels the perception that Punjab can be kept in perpetuity at arm’s length from dignities routinely afforded to others.
Much of Punjab’s argument, however, turns on water—and here clarity matters. The reorganization of Punjab on 1 November 1966 changed political boundaries, not river courses, headworks, floodplains or the physics of spate. Riparian principles remain the bedrock of fair allocation worldwide: rights and responsibilities should follow the river’s geography. A bright-line rule is therefore compelling: claims to assets created after 1 November 1966 on the eastern rivers—Ravi, Beas and Sutlej—should not accrue to non-riparian states. This is not an argument against equity; it is an argument for honest equity, the kind that recognizes who holds the embankments and who pays when they fail. In practice, that means aligning control, costs and benefits with riparian status for post-1966 assets, rather than decoupling them in ways that quietly tax Punjab’s farmers and exchequer.
Water is also an economic asset. Treat it as free, and you guarantee waste upstream and resentment downstream. Treat it as fairly priced—or compensate transparently where fiscal capacity is limited—and you create incentives for conservation, maintenance and safety. If non-riparian states receive water through infrastructure for which Punjab bears construction risk, O&M, desiltation, and flood-repair burdens, then a clear, regulated tariff must follow the flow. Where the tariff is socially or fiscally infeasible, the Union government should make Punjab whole through a compensatory transfer. Anything less reduces Punjab to a subsidizing conduit that fixes breaches, cremates its dead, and then watches its water leave without fair value.
Floods lay bare these equities. When embankments, distributaries and rural roads are damaged, the fiscal shock to a single state can be devastating; the human toll is worse. Punjab needs—and deserves—a humane flood compact with the Union: 100 percent Union-funded compensation for verified household, livelihood and farm losses, including movable and immovable property, livestock, farm machinery and standing crops (at MSP or notified rates), with interim relief within seven days and final settlements within sixty. Infrastructure repair for embankments, canals and rural roads should be treated as a national calamity cost, not a state-specific expenditure. A uniform national relief grid, standardized documentation and a public dashboard for claims and disbursals would reduce paperwork traps and restore trust. This is not special pleading; it is a federal response to a hydrological reality that does not respect state borders.
The Yamuna arrangements illustrate a second dimension: parity of process. Punjab was historically riparian along the Yamuna Nagar–Jagadhri belt before 1966. Yet when settlements over the Yamuna were negotiated and mediated, Punjab was not even accorded observer status. If pre-1966 riparianhood can be treated as irrelevant in the Yamuna context, then parity demands that post-1966 non-riparian claims over eastern-river assets also be treated as irrelevant. One cannot deny Punjab a seat at the table on the Yamuna and simultaneously endorse non-riparian claims on assets created after 1 November 1966 on the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej. Punjab is not seeking to disturb settled Yamuna shares; it is seeking observer status, full data access for flood warning and conservation, and a Union policy that consistently aligns rights and pricing with riparian reality since 1966.
Underneath all of this lies groundwater—the invisible heart keeping the system alive as canal “arteries” starve. Only around 27 percent of Punjab’s irrigation now comes from canals; the rest is pumped from a rapidly sinking aquifer. Every unmet cubic meter of assured canal supply is replaced by a kilowatt-hour and a borehole, driving the twin burdens of pump-debt and power-debt. The fix is not rhetorical; it is operational. Modernize canal controls to deliver predictable flow to the tail, not just the head. Replace rotational uncertainty with telemetry, volumetric scheduling and tamper-proof outlets. Prioritize canal supplies in the worst-depleted blocks. Price the marginal unit of electricity for irrigation smartly while protecting smallholders. Without this, Punjab’s farmers are condemned to a pump-and-pray treadmill.
The Sutlej–Yamuna Link (SYL) canal sits at the fault line of water and memory. For Punjab, SYL is not a dry engineering debate; it is a wound that, in the past, cost lives and social peace. India’s leadership has often said “blood and water cannot flow together” in the context of the Indus system and grievous terror incidents. The same wisdom applies here. With peace painstakingly restored, reopening a project with such fraught symbolism risks social harmony without solving root-cause hydrology. In the national interest, SYL deserves a dignified, final quietus accompanied by practical, less divisive pathways to water security.
Within the Indus Waters Treaty, India’s sovereign rights over the eastern rivers—Ravi, Beas and Sutlej—are meaningful only if we conserve, store and rationally use what geography already grants us. A Prime Minister-led push should prioritize safe completion and modernization of projects that stabilize the Ravi–Beas–Sutlej system, protect ecological flows so rivers live in lean months, and build smart storage and recharge so furious floods are banked as dry-season security. Where topography permits, plan transfers of surplus flows from the Chenab and Jhelum basins into Punjab for irrigation and recharge, acknowledging that Jammu & Kashmir’s terrain limits expansion but Punjab can utilize additional flow for both farm productivity and aquifer recovery. None of this reopens treaties; it simply uses what is already India’s, responsibly and fully.
What should be done now is straightforward and fair. First, announce a Riparian Fairness Policy that recognizes 1 November 1966 as the cut-off: non-riparian states cannot claim rights over post-reorganization assets on the eastern rivers, and governance structures should reflect this alignment of geography and responsibility. Second, notify a transparent fair-pricing regime for inter-state water delivered to non-riparian recipients, paired with a Union compensation window to ensure Punjab is made whole for the service it renders and the risk it bears. Third, adopt the humane flood compact described above—100 percent Union-funded compensation for people’s losses in Punjab and full Union responsibility for repairing embankments, canals and rural infrastructure as national calamity costs. Fourth, accord Punjab observer status with full data access in the Upper Yamuna fora to improve flood-warning and conservation planning and to restore parity of process.
Punjab is not asking for privilege. It is asking for coherence: that control should follow risk, that pricing should follow service, that parity should follow precedent, and that peace should not be endangered by reopening old wounds. A nation that depends on Punjab’s soldiers in war, its farmers in scarcity, and its entrepreneurs in global markets owes it an institutional settlement that treats water as the economic asset it is, floods as national shocks they are, and people as the citizens they have always been—steadfastly on the frontline, and deserving of fairness.