The Floods Are Speaking, Are We Listening?......by Hargun Kaur
Punjab — the land of beauty, bearer of every sorrow, and warrior through every storm — now helplessly drowns in the relentless rains of 2025. The soil that once fed a nation now cries for help . Is it just rain or reckoning ? Are we under a threat ? Are we witnessing a climatic change or our carelessness catching upon us?
How many more floods will it take before we wake up ?
Flooded Villages, Shattered Lives: Punjab’s Ongoing Struggle:
Punjab’s heartland is drowning — villages have disappeared under water, families have fled their homes, and fields that once promised harvest now resemble lifeless lakes. What remains is fear, uncertainty, and the desperate struggle of thousands battling nature’s fury.
Ramdas village and Ghonewal now lie completely submerged, their people stranded in despair. "We have lost everything—our home, our fields, our cattle. Where will we go now?" lamented a farmer from Ghonewal, echoing the pain of thousands displaced overnight. Families — with children clinging to their mothers and the elderly trembling in exhaustion — have spent the night on rooftops, waiting for help that never truly arrived. With no boats, no rescue in sight, and only the dark waters beneath them, survival itself has become their only prayer. Relief camps remain far away and inadequate, while the cries of the displaced echo louder than any promise of aid.
The situation worsened when the Madhopur Headworks gate broke, unleashing massive surges of water toward Dera Baba Nanak and placing the Ajnala side on high alert, as nearby areas rapidly filled with floodwaters. What were once fertile farmlands have now turned into vast lakes of destruction, swallowing standing crops, livestock, and homes. Property worth crores lies submerged, and fear grips families who watch the waters inch closer every hour.
Even the sacred walls of Kartarpur Sahib, where Guru Nanak Dev Ji spent his final years, now stand drowned in sorrow. The marble floors that once echoed with the footsteps of pilgrims are lost beneath floodwaters, and the Kartarpur Corridor — once a bridge of faith and hope — lies silent and shut. To see the resting place of the Guru submerged is not just a calamity of nature, but a wound on the soul of every believer.
DAMMED DISASTER:
Punjab’s lifelines—its rivers and canals—are straining under the weight of unrelenting monsoon fury. The Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej are in spate, swollen by both torrential rains and the controlled release of dam waters. The Ranjit Sagar and Pong (Beas) dams have surpassed their mapped capacities, while Bhakra teeters just below its danger mark.
In Pathankot, the newly operational Shahpur Kandi Dam joins this tense tableau of overflowing reservoirs. Amid this, the Ravi–Sutlej–Beas canal network—including the Sultanwind-linked irrigation channels—faces heightened threats from rising floodwaters, threatening fields, hamlets, and the faint hope of stability. The water that once nurtured Punjab now looms as a relentless reminder of nature's vengeance and our fragile preparedness.
Punjab’s Flood Crisis – A Wake-Up Call on Climate Action:
The IPCC has confirmed that climate change is intensifying flood drivers such as extreme rainfall and rapid snowmelt, and Punjab’s 2025 floods are a clear example.
Unusually heavy monsoon rains over already saturated land, coupled with swollen rivers, mirror the global shifts caused by warming. The latest WMO Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update warns of an 80% chance that one of the next five years will break 2024’s heat record, and an 86% chance that at least one year will exceed 1.5°C warming, fueling more erratic and intense rainfall.
For Punjab, this means heavier monsoons, cloudbursts, and fragile flood management systems being repeatedly overwhelmed — proving climate change is not a distant threat but a present crisis.
The most alarming part is that these warnings keep coming — louder and clearer each time — yet we continue to overlook them.
How many more 'once-in-a-century' floods will it take before we stop calling them rare? Punjab is not just drowning in water — it’s drowning in warnings we continue to ignore. Raindrops wrote warnings , we erase them away:
It is no longer enough to treat floods as isolated natural disasters and move on once the waters recede. The 2023 floods were a brutal reminder that climate change is not a distant threat — it is already reshaping Punjab’s seasons, rivers, and lives.
And yet, just two years later, the devastation of 2025 has drowned villages like Ramdas and Ghonewal, placed Ajnala on high alert after the Madhopur Headworks breach, and even submerged the sanctity of Kartarpur Sahib.
Pathankot bus stand went under water, crops across Majha belt were destroyed, and families spent nights stranded on rooftops waiting for help that never came. Even as major dams like Bhakra and Pong hold under control, the cracks in our preparedness are laid bare.
These aren’t just weather events — they are failures of foresight. Climate change may be global, but its wounds are local, and Punjab cannot afford to treat each flood as a surprise.
This is our narrow window to act — to repair broken systems, rethink urban planning, and strengthen flood defenses. Because nature has spoken, again and again. These are no longer wake-up calls. This is sleepwalking into disaster, and the next time, we may not be so lucky.
September 1, 2025
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Hargun Kaur, Fellow at AirCare Centre.
hargun0308@gmail.com
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