There is a legal flaw at the root of the Punjab floods

There are multiple reasons for the floods in Punjab which until Thursday (September 4, 2025) had claimed 37 lives. Some people were missing. The floods had also affected 1,600 villages, some towns as well as 400,000 acres of crop. All 23 districts of Punjab have been declared flood prone, 12 of them severely.

The reasons for the floods include heavy downpour, reckless development, logging and denuding forest cover of the Himalayas in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, states also affected badly by floods; the Punjab government has not desilted its rivers in the last 60 years; legal and illegal mining have weakened riverbanks; disputed ownership of land on riverbeds where government says it is encroachment but people claim ownership; and lack of preparation by the Punjab government though the Metrological Department had predicted heavy rains.

While these reasons themselves are enough to create floods, there is one more hidden in legality. That is the Bhakra Beas Management Board (BBMB) controlled by the Union Ministry of Power. BBMB governs the Bhakra Dam on the Sutlej river and Pong Dam on the Beas river. The Punjab State Power Corporation Limited governs the Ranjit Sagar Dam on the Ravi river. Bhakra and Pong store extra water because non-riparian states Haryana and Rajasthan lay claim on them because of the flawed clauses 78 and 79─Bhakra-Nangal and the Beas Projects and the Bhakra Management Board─of the Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1966. These clauses consider Haryana a successor state of Punjab and award it Punjab’s river waters though the Sutlej river is at least 100 km from Haryana’s border. Rivers Chenab and Ravi are further north.

Before India’s independence, the Raja of Bikaner Sir Ganga Singh used to pay levies for water in the canal he constructed for people of his kingdom. After independence, the levies were cancelled but water kept flowing to Rajasthan. The dams storing water for these non-riparian states reduces the dams’ capacity to accommodate heavy inflow from Himachal Pradesh and the lower Himalayas. As the reservoirs reach the danger mark, they release huge amounts of water. This happened in 1988, 1993, 2005, 2019, 2023, 2023 and again this year.

In 1973, the Akali Dal came up with the Anandpur Sahib Resolution. The second point in the Resolution was to transfer the Centre’s rights on the Bhakra headworks to Punjab. Being the flood plains of the Himalayas, Punjab knows the pain of floods. Neither Haryana, nor Rajasthan contribute to Punjab’s rivers or face adverse consequences of flood or drought. The Resolution was also a call for greater federalism; more power to states, labour rights, moving away from the Green Revolution model. Since the greater federalism aspect threatened the then government in power, they labeled the entire Resolution a seditionary document.

Today, the opposition in India asks for federalism, but then, when in power, it banished it. The same clauses in the Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1966 led to the dispute over the Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal in 1982, the Akali Dal’s protest against the project followed by Operation Blue Star and a decade of militancy in Punjab and the ongoing, festering clash between Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. Clause 78 mentioned a two-year period to sort out the issues, but it has now been 59 years. It is high time the Union government settles the matter according to internationally accepted riparian rights. There is no doubt that Haryana and Rajasthan need water. The call should be to treat water like any other resource such as oil, coal and Haryana, Rajasthan pay Punjab for their use, like Punjab pays for resources it uses from other states.

Amandeep Sandhu is a New India Foundation Fellow, 2025-26 and author of Panjab Journeys Through Fault Lines

Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth