On a chilly morning in Ludhiana, mist settles over the fields my grandfather once farmed. Wheat seedlings push tentatively through the soil, their green dulled by a grey sky. I arrived from London in early October, as I often do when I return to India, and followed my familiar ritual: I went straight to the land that shaped my family’s survival. Each visit carries a deeper sense of loss.
Our land lies in Baranhara Talwara, a village just southwest of Ludhiana, where agriculture fades into factories and drains. What was once fertile now feels fragile, exhausted, and increasingly unfamiliar. A few metres away, the quiet breaks. A dark, slick ribbon of water cuts through the fields, heavy with industrial runoff and a stench that lodges in the throat. This is Budha Nallah, among India’s most polluted waterways, and it runs alongside land my family rebuilt after Partition.
Ludhiana is Punjab’s industrial heart. Known as the Manchester of India, it anchors a global textile supply chain, its dyeing units, electroplating factories, bicycle manufacturers, and mills densely packed across the city. Punjab takes its name from Panj-aab, the land of five rivers, yet Budha Nallah stands as a stark reminder of how easily freshwater lifelines are sacrificed to growth.
The 14-kilometre canal channels Ludhiana’s untreated sewage and industrial waste into the Satluj River. Over decades, it has transformed from a freshwater stream into a symbol of regulatory failure and political neglect, carrying the costs of prosperity into the bodies and lands of those living closest to it.
For my family, this story is personal.
My maternal grandfather, Sardar Shaam Singh Sidhu, fled Sargodha in present-day Pakistan during Partition in 1947. He left overnight with his wife and two children, abandoning land and livelihood. Arriving in India with nothing, he chose Ludhiana to begin again. With no formal education, he returned to what he knew: soil. He cleared land by hand, farming wheat, rice, sugarcane, peanuts, and lentils. Known across nearby villages for setting broken bones without charge, he lived by sewa, service without expectation. For him, land was dignity reclaimed.
As Ludhiana industrialised, the water beside his fields began to change. My uncle remembers the late 1960s, when the canal darkened and carried a faint chemical smell. By the 1970s, it was murky. By the 1990s, the stench was constant. During monsoons, black water spilled into fields. Crops wilted. Buffalo refused to drink.
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Today, stepping toward the canal feels like crossing an invisible border. The air grows warm, metallic. The soil hardens into something lifeless, with grass growing in broken patches. Scientists have confirmed what farmers have known for decades. Studies document dangerously high levels of heavy metals, toxic chemicals, pharmaceutical residues, and untreated sewage. Biochemical and chemical oxygen demand levels routinely exceed safe limits by 20 to 40 times. During floods, intensified by climate change, the canal spreads contamination across homes and fields, leaving a tar-like residue behind.
The crisis divides Ludhiana.
In affluent neighbourhoods, where infrastructure keeps the canal at a distance, the pollution is dismissed as inevitable. On the outskirts, where Budha Nallah runs beside homes and fields, it shapes daily life. In Baranhara Talwara, I met a man barely thirty who looked decades older. He spoke of chronic cough, stomach pain, and exhaustion that doctors could not explain. When I asked what he hoped would change, he shrugged. “We stopped expecting help long ago. All we want now is clean water.”
Ludhiana sits in Punjab’s Malwa region, known since the early 2000s as the cancer belt. Studies show cancer rates nearly double the national average. Villages along Budha Nallah and downstream areas dependent on contaminated groundwater report clusters of digestive and reproductive cancers, developmental disorders, and what people call “cancer households,” where illness spans generations.
The pollution does not stop here. Budha Nallah drains into the Satluj, carrying industrial waste across rural Punjab and into Rajasthan, where river water is essential for drinking. This is not a local problem. It is a regional public health crisis.
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The state has long acknowledged the pollution, yet action has faltered. The Punjab Pollution Amendment Act of 2025 raised brief hope before criticism mounted over diluted enforcement and expanded exemptions. As elsewhere in India, economic growth was allowed to outweigh ecological protection. Industry won.
For the past decade, my work has taken me into UN boardrooms, climate funds, and global companies, advising on sustainability, human rights, and environmental strategy. I have spoken at the UN General Assembly, Climate Week, and Harvard on justice and systems change. None of it prepared me for standing on my family’s land and realising how little policy can protect poisoned soil.
Seeing Budha Nallah through the lens of ancestry clarifies a simple truth: human rights are not abstract. They live in bodies, water, and land.
In recent months, I have begun working with local officials, students, NGOs, and foundations to push for reform. But the scale of change required is immense. Punjab needs transparent water data, strict enforcement of effluent standards, upgraded sewage systems, region-wide health screening, emergency remediation for high-risk villages, and political will insulated from industrial pressure.
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People along Budha Nallah do not need sympathy. They need protection.
My grandfather rebuilt his life on this land after one border shattered it. Now another border runs through it, invisible but lethal. Budha Nallah is not just a polluted canal. It is a ledger of choices made and avoided, of communities left to absorb the costs of progress.
Unless we intervene decisively, it will become the inheritance of another generation—one with no land left to rebuild on.
(Harjas Grewal is a social entrepreneur, storyteller, and systems builder. She is the founder of Understory, a climate non-profit focused on South Asia)
