HOW TO DROWN A STATE

A union-led dam board and BJP-ruled states watched as Punjab flooded

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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 ₹13,500 crore, 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.