For the third time in six years, Punjab is reeling under devastating floods. After the 2019 disaster and the 2023 deluge, the 2025 floods have once again turned vast swathes of farmland into lakes and left rural infrastructure battered.
Farmers and officials alike are now asking the same question: are Punjab’s rivers and dams too silted?
Experts from the Drainage Wing of the Water Resources Department said the answer is clear. “There are several factors involved for Punjab’s floods, including unprecedented rains, but our rivers are also choking at certain places. The beds of the Sutlej, Beas, Ravi and seasonal rivulets like Ghaggar and Chakki are raised by 5 to 12 feet at several places because of siltation and nature’s fury is adding to injury,” experts said.
After the 2019 floods, a 2020 government report had warned that Punjab’s rivers contained over 7,000 lakh MT of sand and gravel, enough to increase water-carrying capacity by 15,000–50,000 cusecs if removed. That figure then was already 15 times more than Punjab’s annual sand and gravel requirement. But since then, at least two more floods — in 2023 and now in 2025 — have piled on additional silt. “Since 2019, the volume of trapped sand and gravel has only gone up with each flood,” said a senior officer of the Punjab Canal Wing under the Punjab Water Resources Department.
“The numbers we quoted then are outdated now. The situation is much more serious. The rivers have lost so much depth at certain points that even moderate rain or controlled water releases are causing breaches,” admitted another senior irrigation official.
The data illustrates the crisis starkly. The Sutlej, originally carrying 2–3 lakh cusecs, can barely manage 80,000–90,000 cusecs on most stretches, while at some places it is still carrying up to 2 lakh cusecs. “At some places even 50,000–60,000 cusecs water in the river is breaching the bandhs and at some places even water up to 2 lakh is crossing comfortably. But even a single breach on the river is causing floods in several villages,” said another officer, adding that the Beas and Ravi too have lost large chunks of capacity at several places because silt/ sand gets accumulated and sometimes the water either damages the bandhs on the riverbanks or pushes water back into the low-lying areas.
Experts said that seasonal rivulets such as Ghaggar and Chakki now overflow with far smaller flows than before.
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Despite repeated floods, Punjab has made little headway in desilting, and the reason is the involvement of the environmental issues, huge finances to remove the silt and the lack of proper scientific study about the desilting of rivers, said officials, adding that it is a technical task and requires accuracy.
Though successive governments had approved dozens of mining sites across seven blocks of Punjab for contractors to excavate river material under supervision, insiders say the scheme was half-hearted and patchy. “Simply removing a few truckloads here and there does not solve the problem when thousands of lakh tonnes are choking the channels,” said an irrigation department officer.
Officials stress that only systematic, scientific desilting — carving a deep central channel (cunette), maintaining natural slopes, and restoring the river to its bed level — can provide lasting relief to a some extenet when the it’s bucketing down in the rainy season in the catchment areas of the rivers. “If even half of what we pay out in compensation after each flood was spent on preventive desilting, Punjab would not be drowning every two years,” said an Executive Engineer in the drainage wing.
For farmers who lose crops with every breach, the cycle is becoming unbearable. “It is like paying for the same mistake again and again,” said a farmer in Hoshiarpur whose fields are still submerged.
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Officials in the Bhakra Beas Management Board (BBMB) added that there is a need for desilting of dams as well, as ever since Bhakra and Pong have come into existence, silt has not been removed from these reservoirs. “The dams may have filled with 10 to 15% silt and it is also a huge amount. Its removal can create huge capacity in the dams,” said a senior dam officer, adding that it is again a question of where to dump that silt and how to remove it without disturbing the equilibrium of the dam.
While BBMB chairman Manoj Tripathi could not be contacted even after repeated attempts, water resources minister Barinder Goyal said that the government is ready for the scientific study on de-silting of rivers.
“The Centre should also support the state in this as there are several environmental issues involved in it. If there are choking places and water simply does not move forward, then silt removal is necessary, but it needs both Centre and state efforts as Punjab is a perennial state and the danger of floods will always loom large over it,” he said, adding that the Punjab government has now launched a policy ‘Jisda Khet Usdi Ret’ under which several farmers who have farmland close to rivers can sell the sand if they get sand deposits in their fields through floods.
A senior officer in the Drainage Department said that as waters recede, the same question looms over Punjab’s flood-hit villages and towns: will desilting at the required places remain a file note, or will the state finally dig its rivers clean before the next monsoon.
