Punjab pumps groundwater faster than anywhere else on Earth.

Punjab extracts 156.36 per cent of the water its aquifers can recharge each year. That number, from the Central Ground Water Board’s National Compilation on Dynamic Ground Water Resources of India, 2025, is the highest of any state in the country. The national average is 60.63 per cent. Of Punjab’s 153 administrative blocks, 111 are now classified as over-exploited. In Sangrur, the home district of the state’s Chief Minister, extraction has reached 309.99 per cent. The aquifer is being mined at three times the rate the land can refill.

This is sometimes told as an environmental story. It is more honestly told as a policy story.

Anyone who has spent time in rural Punjab over the last twenty years has heard the same conversation in different villages. The tubewell that was twenty feet down in someone’s grandfather’s day is now two hundred. The submersible motor that cost a few thousand rupees has become a financial decision worth lakhs. The land still looks alive from the road. The figures in the assessment reports do not look alive at all.

The point most people miss

The crisis is not driven by climate. It is not driven by population growth. It is not driven by the geology of the Indo-Gangetic plain, which is, if anything, generously endowed with groundwater.

It is driven by four decisions taken in New Delhi and Chandigarh between 1965 and 1997, three of which are still in operation.

The first was the Green Revolution package of the late 1960s. Punjab was selected as the front line of India’s bid for food self-sufficiency, and the policy mix that came with that role — high-yielding rice and wheat varieties, subsidised fertiliser, subsidised tubewells, and assured procurement — reshaped what Punjab grew. In 1960, paddy occupied about six per cent of the cropped area. By 2018–19, it occupied just over 75 per cent. Pulses, which had been twenty-four per cent of gross cropped area, collapsed to 0.2 per cent. This is not a story about farmer preference. It is a story about which crop had a guaranteed buyer.

That guaranteed buyer is the second decision. The Minimum Support Price system, operated through the Food Corporation of India, procures wheat and paddy in effectively unlimited volumes at fixed prices. For any other crop, no such guarantee exists at scale. The agricultural economist R.S. Ghuman calls this a “paddy–water nexus” — more paddy, more tubewells, more groundwater out of the ground, more lock-in for the next season. Punjab’s own Finance Minister, in 2020, asked the Centre to extend MSP procurement to maize and pulses precisely on the grounds that without it, diversification was economically irrational. The request was not met.

The third decision was made in February 1997, when the Punjab government made agricultural electricity free for all farmers, regardless of land holding. The marginal cost of running a tubewell fell to zero. According to a peer-reviewed study published in Agricultural Economics in 2022, average groundwater depth in Punjab fell 1.9 metres more than in neighbouring Haryana, which retained a flat-rate tariff. That single policy change accounts for a 22 per cent increase over Punjab’s baseline groundwater depth. From 2017 to 2021, Punjab farmers used more than 12,000 gigawatt-hours of free electricity every year. Today, over 93 per cent of the state’s roughly 14.76 lakh tubewells are electric. Agricultural power subsidies account for more than three-quarters of Punjab’s total electricity subsidy bill.

The fourth piece is what fell apart while the first three were taking hold. In 1960, canals served 58 per cent of Punjab’s irrigated area. Today they serve under 29 per cent. The state has 14,500 kilometres of canals on paper, but the Upper Bari Doab Canal’s effective capacity has shrunk from 9,000 cusecs to 4,000, and in districts like Barnala, Sangrur and Patiala, only a fraction of the available canal supply is actually being used for irrigation. Canals recharge the water table. Tubewells empty it. The shift from one to the other was not an act of nature.

What is being sold, and what is being spent

If you tally Ghuman’s numbers carefully, you arrive at the cruellest figure in the entire research pack. In 2017–18, the water consumed to grow rice in Punjab amounted to 71,928 billion litres. Of that, 63,626 billion litres — 88.5 per cent — was embedded in rice sent to the central procurement pool, to be distributed across the rest of India.

In other words, Punjab is not only depleting its groundwater. It is exporting it. A state already short of surface water, located on a semi-arid plain with annual rainfall of 400 to 700 millimetres, is being asked by policy design to grow one of the most water-intensive crops in the world and to send 88.5 per cent of the embedded water away. Punjab uses 5,337 litres of water per kilogram of rice produced, the worst water productivity of any major rice-growing state in India. West Bengal, by comparison, uses 2,605.

What does it mean to call a state agriculturally productive if it is liquidating an underground asset every year to keep the figures up?

The countdown

The National Green Tribunal monitoring committee, citing CGWB data, has warned that Punjab’s usable groundwater — the first aquifer, from the surface to a hundred metres — will be exhausted by around 2029. Below 300 metres, water becomes unfit for irrigation or drinking, and extraction at those depths costs 40 to 50 lakh rupees per tubewell, which puts it out of reach for most farmers. The total economic reserve, on current trajectories, runs out around 2039.

These numbers are not predictions about a distant future. They are projections from official monitoring committees, treating the data we already have, on the policy environment that is already in place. As of last year, of the 153 blocks in the state, only 17 — just over 11 per cent — were classified as safe.

What we do not yet know is how the deeper aquifer behaves under continued stress. Standard hydrogeological models used in India arguably underestimate the rate of decline below 100 metres. The numbers above are likely conservative. That is a caveat, not a comfort.

Why nothing changes

A state can recognise a crisis and still be politically incapable of acting on it.

The Punjab Preservation of Subsoil Water Act, 2009 delayed paddy transplanting to align it with the monsoon. It slowed the decline — from 0.9 metres a year between 2000 and 2008, to 0.7 metres a year between 2008 and 2012 — but it did not reverse it. It also produced its own disaster. Pushing paddy harvest into October and November compressed the wheat sowing window, and the result, documented in a 2022 paper in Economics Letters, was a 19 to 47 per cent rise in winter stubble burning. The smoke that blankets Delhi every November is partly the side-effect of a law written to save Punjab’s water.

Direct Seeded Rice has been promoted by Punjab Agricultural University for years. Adoption sits at around 10 to 15 per cent of paddy acreage and is not climbing reliably. PR-126, the short-duration variety, helps but does not solve. None of these technologies changes the underlying calculus: paddy has a guaranteed buyer, alternative crops do not, and water is free.

Successive state governments — Congress, SAD, and AAP alike — have kept both the free electricity policy and the paddy MSP procurement intact. The reason is not mysterious. Each was bought with electoral capital and cannot be unwound without spending it back. Awareness is not the missing ingredient. Every farmer in Mansa knows the water table is falling. The ingredient that is missing is a political price the system is willing to pay to change course.

The human stakes

Sixteen thousand six hundred and six farmers and labourers took their own lives in Punjab between 2000 and 2016. Around seventy per cent of those deaths were linked to indebtedness. A small farmer in Punjab today carries a debt-to-income ratio of 1.43. The cost of redrilling a tubewell to a deeper aquifer — 40 to 50 lakh rupees, in the deepest belts — is, for most, the cost of bankruptcy. The same families increasingly draw water that is saline, alkaline, or contaminated with arsenic, fluoride, or uranium, because the shallower aquifers are gone.

This is what the policy chain produces at the end of the line. Not a tidy statistic in a state document, but a household decision about whether to keep farming, whether to keep the children in school, whether to send a son to Canada on the promise of a better life. The groundwater table and the migration figure are reading the same underlying story.

Where this leaves us

There is no honest version of a solution that does not touch the three policy instruments still in force: free agricultural power, MSP concentrated on paddy and wheat, and the centre–state arrangement under which Punjab grows the country’s grain and pays the ecological cost alone. Metered power with direct benefit transfers to protect small farmers; credible MSP extension to maize, pulses and oilseeds; canal restoration funded by a Centre that has spent fifty years drawing on Punjab’s aquifer through procurement. All of this is known. None of it is easy. None of it can be avoided.

What the country gets out of pretending otherwise is another decade of headlines about a crisis everyone agrees is serious and no one is allowed to fix. What Punjab gets is a falling water table, and a generation that increasingly does not believe the state will be habitable for theirs.

The first aquifer runs out in four years.