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The floodwaters that swept across Punjab in late August, triggered by unusually heavy rains in the Himalayan region and the state’s own torrential downpours, had begun to recede by the last week of September. What remains is a trail of devastation. Village after village bears the scars with fields smothered under layers of silt and sand, homes reduced to shells and farmers, once proud custodians of India’s food bowl, now speaking of debt, hunger and uncertainty.
In just over a fortnight, more than 2,500 villages were submerged, affecting nearly 400,000 farmers, according to government data. The deluge destroyed crops on over 200,000 hectares (ha) of cultivable land, killed nearly 1,000 large animals and 35,000 poultry and left behind layers of sand that make farming impossible for the coming season. Fifty-eight people lost their lives (see “Plan or perish”, Down To Earth, 16-30 September, 2025).
In the villages of Machhiwal and Ghonewala in Amritsar district, which were swallowed by the waters of Ravi river on August 26 after an embankment collapsed, life has come to a grinding halt. The floodwaters have left behind knee-deep silt inside all the houses of the villages. “The structures are no longer habitable,” says Attar Singh, a resident of Ghonewala. He had planted paddy in almost 2 ha and sugarcane in another 4 ha this season. Today, his fields remain waterlogged, and the crops have completely rotted.
Sukhman Preet, another farmer in Ghonewala, points to what was once his 0.6-ha sugarcane field. It is now buried under nearly a metre of sand. “How will we remove this? There has been no help,” he asks.
Gunnur Singh of Kot Gurbaksh village in Amritsar says that for the first time, farmers in his area are hiring tank-equipped combine harvesters from Uttar Pradesh, as traditional tractors and combines cannot operate on the uneven, waterlogged landscape.
Desperation runs deep across villages in Gurdaspur district, just north of Amritsar. Farmers told Down To Earth (DTE) the floods have not only destroyed their standing kharif crop…
This article was originally published in the October 16-31, 2025 print edition of Down To Earth