Punjab’s ecology under siege: Partap Singh Bajwa

Leader of the Opposition in the Punjab Assembly Partap Singh Bajwa on Tuesday launched a scathing attack on the Aam Aadmi Party-led Punjab Government, accusing it of deliberately ignoring rampant illegal mining and pushing the state’s fragile ecology to the brink of irreversible damage during its four years in office.

Bajwa said unchecked illegal mining had unleashed a grave environmental crisis across Punjab, devastating riverbeds, destabilising critical infrastructure and flattening semi-hilly terrain. Citing strong observations made by the National Green Tribunal (NGT), he noted that so-called “river desilting” and hill mining operations

were, in reality, large-scale commercial exploitation carried out in blatant violation of mandatory environmental safeguards.

The NGT’s intervention led to a stay on desilting activities in rivers and seasonal rivulets across Punjab, including key locations in Ropar district, after it observed that the operations were driven not by flood-control objectives but by commercial interests. Bajwa asserted that this judicial rebuke amounts to a direct indictment of the AAP government’s failure to regulate and monitor mining activities.