Floods don’t care about borders

“Wars don’t strike here as hard as the floods do,” says Jasveer Singh. The 73-year-old farmer is returning from his flooded fields which lie across the barbed wire fencing along the India-Pakistan border.

“Wherever you look, there is only water. Darya ne kabza kar leya hai [The river has taken over]. It must be running 15 to 20 feet deep,” Jasveer told PARI in late September 2025, referring to the Sutlej.

Forty acres of farmland in Walle Shah Hithar village lie in the area between the fence – built around 1990 – and the international boundary that is marked by concrete pillars. The farmers who till this land need BSF permission to access their fields. Jasveer’s family holds 19 acres here that they acquired in 1980 when land in border villages was far cheaper than in their own village, Theh Kalender – a 30-minute ride away on his scooty.

When the floods hit Punjab in August 2025, 15 acres of Jasveer’s land were inundated. The ripe paddy was destroyed. Speaking to PARI in January 2026, he says, “Wheat could not be sown because the land remains too wet. Around seven-eight acres has drained, I might have to leave it for another six months or a year before it is ready for cultivation.” Two crop cycles have been lost already.

The floods killed at least 40 people across Punjab, swept away 7,161 livestock, and damaged over 14,000 houses and about 200,000 hectares of cropped land. “Jado pakkan tey aae audo harrh rul ke le gaya. [When the paddy was ready for harvest, the flood ruined it all],” says Ashok Singh, who, like Jasveer, is a farmer in Walle Shah Hithar, Fazilka district.

“I cannot sleep properly. If I wake up once, the whole night passes worrying,” the 40-year-old tells PARI. His family holds 10 acres just across the fencing where they had sown paddy. The entire plot was submerged. Produce from the land supports the family of 10.

Jasveer and Ashok lost standing crop, but Ruliya Singh lost even his home. A resident of Ram Singh Bhaini village, four kilometres away, the 70-year-old’s eyes well up as he speaks. His house, rebuilt after the 2023 floods, is gone – all that remains of it are scattered bricks. Behind him are four acres of submerged farmland. “We had sown paddy… all of it was destroyed. The water was running on the road here,” Ruliya says.

The Sutlej waters meander in and out of India and Pakistan; in Fazilka and Firozpur districts, the river’s snake-like flow causes it to occupy a wide area, spreading out dangerously when the volume of water increases, and swiftly flooding villages near the banks.

This is what happened when after days of heavy rain and poor drainage, several villages in Fazilka were waterlogged in early August 2025. The situation worsened after the release of excess water from the Bhakra Dam.

“There was excessive rainfall this year. The catchment areas, including parts of Himachal Pradesh, also got a lot more water, which eventually flowed into our rivers and dams. When a large volume is suddenly released at the end of July or August, even strong embankments can fail. I don’t think enough preparation was done,” said Dr. Sucha Singh, an Assistant Professor at Panjab University’s department of Geography.

Heavy rainfall had been predicted this year and the dam water could have been released well before the monsoon arrived, he added.

The Ministry of Jal Shakti (water resources), in a Rajya Sabha reply in December 2025, denied that poor dam maintenance or mismanagement at Bhakra and Pong worsened the floods, and said that the dams operated within safety rules. Minimum 24-hour advance notice is given before release of water, and the storage levels before the monsoon were “in the range of average values,” it said.

“Jungle honda si, border agey aethe si. Asi kheti de liey tayar kita si [This was all jungle. The border was nearby. We prepared this land for farming],” recalls Ruliya. He has stacked bricks from his fallen house into a makeshift shelter where he waits all day, every day, for the arrival of government officials who can decide if he will be granted compensation.

Most residents in the roughly 25 villages of Fazilka district that lie along the border belong to the Rai Sikh community, categorised as a Scheduled Caste in Punjab. They were settled on this land some years after Partition. The families were recognised as cultivators, but ownership of the land remained with the government. Such land is referred to as kacchi zameen (unregistered land).

Some of the land near the banks of the Sutlej, such as that tilled by Ashok and Ruliya and Jasveer, is kacchi zameen. When floods strike, crop losses on this unregistered land that the farmers have been cultivating for almost half a century are not easily eligible for compensation.

The Punjab government announced a compensation of Rs. 20,000 per acre of damaged crop – a sum that farmers say is grossly inadequate and will not even cover the cost of cultivating the paddy. But this sum is not assured for all.

“We don’t know whether we would be compensated for the crops destroyed on the kacchi zameen. The officials aren’t saying anything about it,” Ashok told PARI in September.

“Sada hun 15 lakh [rupees] karz hai [We have a debt of 15 lakh rupees now],” says Ashok. This includes Rs. 5 lakh that Ashok and his brother borrowed from the arthiya (commission agent) to sow the paddy that was lost in the floods. Every season, they borrow from the arthiya to cover the costs of cultivation. When they sell the harvest, he deducts the loan from their payment.

“Government records show that we cultivate the land. Until ownership rights are granted to us, the land belongs to the Centre,” says Ashok who wonders how he will pay his children’s school fees, emergency medical expenses and more.

The deputy commissioner of Fazilka district, Amarpreet Kaur Sandhu, told PARI in early October that compensating farmers for crop losses on kacchi zameen “is under consideration.”

In January 2026, Fazilka teshildar Jaspreet Singh said 99 per cent of the compensation had been disbursed. Asked whether those with kacchi zameen had also been compensated, he avoided a direct reply and said, “it has been done as per rules.”

Jasveer remembers the devastating floods of 1988, in which hundreds of people had died. “The floods had come suddenly in mid-September of 1988 and receded within a week,” he recalls. The state had received 1171.0 mm rainfall that monsoon, more than twice the normal. Yet the water drained away soon.

The 2025 rainfall in Punjab was half of the 1988 level – 620.9 mm. However, the natural flow of excess flood waters had been blocked. “Unbridled rise in built-up areas of concrete does not allow water to seep into the ground,” points out Sucha Singh. “The construction of roads, poorly planned bridges and concrete walling on or across the natural drainage systems such as choe [seasonal rivulets] also stopped.”

Kahan Singh Pannu, former secretary in the state’s water resources department, said that the carrying capacity of rivers in Punjab has been steadily declining due to silting, with the storage capacity of dams reduced by about 25 per cent. “This aggravates the chances and fury of floods,” he added.

Climate change is triggering sudden torrential rains and cloudbursts in Himachal Pradesh and Jammu. With rivers and dams choked with silt, even mild floods can now breach embankments and cause extensive damage, turning the lives of farmers like Ashok and Jasveer and Ruliya upside down.

Ruliya is counting his losses. The cost of growing the paddy and the income he would have earned from selling it together add up to nearly Rs. one lakh an acre, he says. “Whatever help we are getting, wheat grain, ration, cattle feed, it is coming from the villages behind [further inland, away from the river and the border],” he adds.

The state should work at preventing recurring destruction rather than merely responding after the floods strike, say those who have studied the situation closely.

Since 2013 there have been floods every year, say villagers in Walle Shah Hithar, and the ground is now about four feet higher than before. In 2023, floodwaters reached the villages in July and stayed until September. The 2025 floods saw the main channel of the Sutlej river running along the border cut nearly 500 metres into farmland. Further, recent floodwaters have levelled the ground, removing the roughly 10 feet undulations in the land.

A river has its natural flood limits and flood fringe zones on both sides, where it expands whenever there is heavy rain. “Because people now live or farm there, it is perceived as flooding, even though that land was always meant to be the river’s own territory,” Sucha Singh said.

A lot of the land given to Scheduled Caste communities was actually the flood-fringe area which bears the brunt. Embankments need to be strengthened and built further back to give the river room to expand without destroying farms and homes, he told PARI.

In May 2025, when India and Pakistan were engaged in a military confrontation, Walle Shah Hithar was alert but not anxious. “Nothing happened here. It was completely safe,” a villager said. Months later, the village was ravaged. By water, not guns.