Mohan Guruswamy | The downfall of Punjab, and lessons for the rest of India

There was a time when Punjab was India’s model state. It was number one in almost every field. Then people like Beant Singh, Amarinder Singh, the Badal clan and many others happened. From being the country’s role model, it has now become a disaster zone and a national burden. It has been saddled with corrupt governments for many decades now. The “Khalistan” insurgency cost it more than just in lives. Good governance norms went out of the window too. Punjab is now our top handout dependent state. Yet the state still lives under an illusion that it contributes to the rest of India, and without it, India will literally starve.

A former Punjab civil supplies and food minister, Adarsh Prakash Singh Kairon, a man with a prominent and known lineage, had the temerity to say: “The food purchase scheme is not a profitable proposition. Punjab is mainly doing it in the national interest.” The notion that Punjab feeds the whole of India is quite absurd now. India has for a few decades produced much more foodgrain than it needs. India exported foodgrain worth an average of Rs.6,000 crore a year since 1991, and last year it touched Rs.27,000 crore. The production has been in the vicinity of 260 million tonnes during the past three years, despite the droughts. India has food reserves of 49 million tonnes worth Rs.50,000 crore, and twice more than it needs.

It is actually the other way around. The rest of India supports Punjab, with this absurd minimum support price (MSP) scheme, that is actually above the market price. This combined with the PDS of low-priced cereal is actually a gigantic subsidy scheme. The total food and agriculture subsidies allocation in Budget 2023-24 was Rs.2,87,000.00 crore, of which more than half goes towards food subsidy and another quarter goes for fertiliser subsidy. The bulk of the procurement accrues in the states of Punjab, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. Which means the bulk of the MSP subsidy accumulates here.

There is no doubt that Punjab is a major foodgrain production centre, but the notion that it feeds India is quite exaggerated. In 2019, of the total national foodgrain production of 264 million tonnes, Punjab produced 27.4 million tonnes, or about 10 per cent. Admittedly Punjab’s productivity is much higher than the rest of the country’s as it accounts for only about five per cent of the 54 million hectares of irrigated farmland.

The claims of the Punjab government too foster this fiction. Its website once claimed: “It contributes nearly two-thirds to the total production of foodgrain and a third of milk production in the country. It is the leading producer of wheat, thereby contributing to national food security. Even though Punjabis account for less than 2.5 per cent of India’s population, they are one of the most prosperous races in India. Their per capita income is twice the national average.” The national per capita income at current prices is Rs.74,000 and Punjab’s is Rs.92,000. Yet most of us have internalised the long-gone story of Punjab standing between India and starvation, and Punjab being the country’s most prosperous state.

God and this country have both been good to Punjab. Today 85.15 per cent of all land in Punjab is arable and 89.72 per cent of it is with perennial irrigation. More than half of this is due to the huge Central government projects, Bhakra Nangal being the most notable of them. The British, in their quest for land revenue, rightly chose Punjab for special attention. They invested in its irrigation. But after 1947, this trend accelerated. In 1955, the total national outlay for irrigation was Rs.29,106.30 lakh. Of this, Punjab got Rs.10,952.10 lakh, or 37.62 per cent. By contrast, Bihar got only Rs.1,323.30 lakh, which is only 4.54 per cent of the irrigation outlay. The Bhakra Nangal Dam, one of Jawaharlal Nehru’s grandest temples of modern India, planned with an outlay of '7,750 lakh, alone irrigates 1.44 million hectares, or about 40 per cent of Punjab’s net irrigated area. The consequences of this bounty are manifold.

The spectrum of regional inequalities in India is a very wide one. Punjab and Bihar represent the two ends of the wide spectrum. Though this might even have been the case historically, a study of state GDPs in the decades after Independence reveals that the width of the spectrum has only widened. In 1965, Punjab’s per capita income was Rs.562 and was 1.7 times that of Bihar’s Rs.332.

Punjab now has a per capita income of Rs.92,000 and Bihar’s is Rs.31.000, or about 3:1. But other changes have also set in. Once India’s most prosperous state, it now lags behind Haryana, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Kerala and Telangana state, and is about at par with the neighbouring hill state of Himachal Pradesh.

Punjab has all the bounties nature can give, and it has had more than its rightful share of Central government assistance, not just in terms of food procurement and subsidies but also by way of employment. Punjab has also benefited by a disproportionately large recruitment into the armed forces and the paramilitary, giving most rural families a second stream of income. Each year, about 60,000 Punjabi officers and men retire from the armed forces, and over a million draw pensions. Government pensions provide an income far in excess of the average national per capita income. Yet, Punjab is afflicted with a severe blight. An official government study found that 67 per cent households in Punjab have at least one person addicted to drugs. Yet another study by the Narcotics Control Bureau discovered that almost 40 per cent of men in Punjab are addicted to drugs.

So, what has brought Punjab to this pass?

One is that Punjab has been reeling under bad governments. Its politicians and their bureaucratic fellow conspirators, irrespective of party affiliation, have been among the country’s most venal and corrupt. A Punjab Police SP, Salwinder Singh, facilitated the attack on the Pathankot airbase by Pakistani terrorists. The silence that has descended around him is understandable. According to a former Punjab DGP, a few years ago the intelligence department had compiled a list of drug barons. This list had the names of powerful politicians from every political party and police officials at every level. Salwinder Singh, now serving a 10-year sentence for rape, is only the tip of the iceberg. Just recently, radical “Khalistani” preacher Amritpal Singh was able to elude the police for over five weeks before being finally arrested from Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale’s village. Unless Punjab gets a better government, this downfall will continue.