Why a new deal for udta Punjab is essential

The launch of a book on Punjab produced a think — Where is Punjab headed? With a Vidhan Sabha election scheduled in less than two years, this is an appropriate time to take stock.

If Afghanistan was the crossroad of civilisations and is the 'graveyard of empires', then Punjab was the pathway through which a multitude of invaders made their way from the Khyber Pass to the Indo-Gangetic plains in their expeditions of plunder. Punjab was invaded over 200 times between 1000 AD and the mid-nineteenth century.

It gave rise to a unique brand of fatalism that can be summed up by an earthy proverb: 'khaada pita laahe da, baaki Ahmed Shahe da.' Loosely translated, it means whatever you have eaten or drunk will be yours, the rest the raider will take away.

The British, the last of the aggressors, finally annexed Punjab on March 29, 1849 after the Second Anglo-Sikh War and made it an adjunct of the Bengal Presidency.

A majestic sprawl of land from Delhi to the Khyber Pass, Punjab was first partitioned on November 9, 1901 when it's five northwestern districts and five political agencies were carved out to create the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP).

Forty-six years later, it was again partitioned on August 15, 1947, with the creation of the dominions of India and Pakistan. Two million people were killed and 20 million displaced from their home and hearth between Peshawar and Lahore in the most brutal fratricide between Hindus and Sikhs on one side and the Muslims on the other.

It gave rise to another adage that came to symbolise the relationship between the Hindus and Sikhs -- 'Nau-maas da rishta', meaning eternally inseparable like nails and skin.

However, barely had the storm of the Partition settled than the demand for a Punjabi-speaking state within the boundaries of India came to the fore in 1948. It was called the Punjabi Suba Movement. It was symptomatic of perhaps a correctly placed fear of a loss of identity.

It led to another partition of Punjab in 1966 -- a trifurcation that led to the creation of Haryana and upgradation of Himachal Pradesh. That is where Punjab stood on November 1, 1966 -- a trimmed, truncated and mutilated ghost of its former imposing self. Hardly had the new state settled down than it was hit by Naxalism a year later, only to be put down with state coercion.

In October 1973, came the Sri Anandpur Sahib Resolution, demanding more regional autonomy.

By 1980, militancy had started mushrooming in Punjab. A whole generation was lost to the depredations of terrorism and state excesses by 1995. What followed was three decades of diffident governance, going across various dispensations, because the problems had by then become so convoluted that it was easier for the political leadership to skirt them than confront them.

The turbulence in the form and shape of the farmers' movement over the past five years has deeper psychological roots -- in the unaddressed sense of alienation going back to 1947.

That is where Punjab stands today, facing five fundamental challenges that are existential to its very survival.

The public debt would balloon to Rs 3.74 lakh crore or more by the end of this fiscal. The debt-to-GDP ratio would be to the tune of 53.7 per cent by FY-2027-28. With Rs 36,766 crore budgeted for debt-servicing in the current financial year, Punjab is sinking into the quicksand of liabilities.

However, there is no public or even private discussion on it among Punjab's political elite, either in the Vidhan Sabha or outside. Vidhan Sabha sessions are barely a two-or-three-day affair now, and where a farcical 'he said, she said' is the order of the day.

The second is the declining size of the landholdings in Punjab. As many as 84 per cent of the farmers hold just three-to-five acres of land. Fragmentation and subdivision is only escalating, with land around cities becoming sprawling, often unregulated, urban agglomerations.

Even with the crutch of a minimum support price, agriculture as a standalone occupation is not viable. Without touching on ownership rights, how to make agriculture viable is a debate that is not even taking place among the political parties in Punjab.

Would an aggressive resuscitation of the cooperative movement to help bring down the input costs be the way forward?

Moreover, the younger generation abjures farming as the hard work and tedium is not commensurate to the returns.

The third is Punjab's water table, which is dropping like a stone. In June 2022, a National Green Tribunal (NGT) monitoring committee, citing a report, rang a loud alarm bell that state was left with groundwater to last for just 17 years. However, no one in Punjab's governance circles seems to have even heard the bell ringing. If, by 2039, Punjab runs out of groundwater and becomes a virtual desert, are the consequences of that lost on the rulers of Punjab across the political dispensations?

The fourth is the flight of the young. No young person wants to live in Punjab if they can help it. The International English Language Testing System (IELTS) is the biggest industry in the state. Its turnover is estimated at nearly a billion and a half dollars. It, perhaps, is only rivalled in monetary terms by the illegal migration industry, an organised crime operation whose turnover is even difficult to estimate.

The lack of both employment opportunities and employability has made Punjab a soft target for cross-border narcotics operations and home-grown gangsterism, which is playing havoc with the social and governance ethos of Punjab for decades now.

The fifth is that given the locational disadvantage of Punjab, the sealed western borders since 1965 and the intense internal turbulence going back four and a half decades, large manufacturing industry is hardly going to come in Punjab.

Given that agriculture is unviable and manufacturing virtually non-existent as compared to the southern and western states, what is the way forward?

A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has been presented by the fourth industrial revolution —artificial intelligence, robotics, genomics, biotechnology, quantum computing and internet of things. However, to take advantage of this, the entire education paradigm would have to be radically reengineered, from nursery onwards.

Punjab requires a new deal and the starting point is that the political class must talk to each other rather than talking at each other. At least a two-decade socio-economic agenda by consensus needs to be created, much like the national compact on liberalisation and globalisation crafted in 1991, which has held across different dispensations.