In a revaluation prepared by two eminent specialists at the Irrigation and Power Research Institute, Punjab, Dr. G.S. Dhillon, Director and Mr. B.S. Panchhi have pointed to the disaster that is looming large over the agricultural horizon of Punjab. As a result of the gifting away of the Punjab river waters to non -riparian states, there has been an excessive exploitation of the ground water. Consequently the water table has gone down alarmingly in most areas of the Punjab. The specialists have warned that if the process is allowed to continue unchecked, the underground source of irrigation in Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Jullundur, Kaputhala, Hoshiarpur, Ropar, Ludhiana, Patiala, and Sangrur districts will completely dry up by the end of this century.
The study by the two government specialists endorses the grim picture that the Sikh Ex-servicemen and Intellectuals Form painted in their exhaustively researched document issued in early 1983 and incorporated in the booklet “The Betrayal of the Sikhs”. That document was dismissed by the Indian government as a seditious conspiracy to arouse the passions of the peasantry. But now government’s own specialists state that “at present tube wells irrigate 20 times more area in Punjab than the canal system in the command area” and they have described it as a gross exploitation of the ground water potential. Understandably, they have refrained from mentioning the reasons for this over exploitation. They would have been arrested for sedition if they had even remotely suggested that this sorry situation is the direct result of the arbitrary allocation of the Punjab river waters to states like Haryana, Delhi and Rajasthan. Punjab farmers were left with no option but to draw water from ground when 83.3% of the Punjab river waters was allotted to the three non-riparian states leaving the riparian state with just 16.7% of the waters. The illegal diversion of the Punjab waters to non-riparian states was motivated by a communal design to reduce the state to a barren wasteland so as to break the economic backbone of the Sikhs.
The policy makers in Delhi had come to the conclusion that Sikhs could not be fully assimilated into Hinduism so long they were economically strong. Since 80% of the Sikhs depend directly or indirectly upon farming, to destroy their economy it was necessary to rob them of their water resources. The extractable water potential in Punjab is only 3 M.A.F. whereas 0.6 million tube wells in 1983 were already extracting 12 M.A.F. water leading to a sharp decline in the water level. But instead of reversing this process to save Punjab from becoming an arid desert, Indian rulers are forcibly digging the Sutlej-Jamuna-Link (SYL) Canal to take still more river waters out of the Punjab. How can Sikhs feel secure in a system that viciously perpetrates injustice and conspires to destroy not only their separate identity but their existence as well.
The plunder of the Punjab river waters is one aspect of the many pronged attack that Delhi has been covertly and overtly carrying on against the Sikhs ever since independence. This alone should serve to open the eyes of those “ignorant” Sikhs who still keep on repeating the obsolete theme of placing trust in the Indian government, who feel no compunctions in compromising with those who have made it a habit to desecrate the Golden Temple and who are engaged in history’s worst genocidal State terrorism.
Submission to tyranny is repugnant to Sikh ethos. Time has come either to stand up as Sikhs and face the challenge or to renounce the Sikh tenets and accept slavery. In the current context there is no place for the sceptics and the spectators.
Article extracted from this publication >> October 9, 1987
