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Paper short abstract

This paper shows how drought risk and water contamination co‑emerge in Punjab's Green Revolution aftermath. It argues that planetary health in Punjab demands remedial justice‑centered water governance, redistributing expertise to communities and enforcing toxic liability for corporate/state actors.

Paper long abstract

This paper argues that drought risk from severe groundwater depletion and the proliferation of contaminated waters co-emerge in Punjab from the layered afterlives of colonial canal irrigation and the Green Revolution’s paddy–wheat monocropping regime. Based on nine months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in northern Punjab, I track water’s movements across: (1) laboratories and field trials at a state agricultural university and an extension centre; (2) the political life of the water intensive paddy crop; and (3) a water justice movement, Kale Pani Da Morcha (“Movement Against Black Water”), contesting pollution in the Buddha Nala canal tributary. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, scientific protocols, litigation files, and media coverage, I map a contested hydroscape in which water-extractive agrarian capitalism, industrial and agricultural effluents, infrastructural decay, state neglect, and undone/contested science converge. In this hydroscape, water is at once scarce, toxic, and—during extreme events—dangerously abundant as flood risks intensify. I show how technocratic fixes (deeper tubewells, treatment plants) redistribute harm while consolidating authority, leaving toxic accountability diffuse and expertise centralised. I propose a reparative, justice centered water governance that repositions farmers, affected communities, and activists as knowledge holders; links liability to polluting firms and state agencies; and attends to more than human ecologies of crop–water relations. The paper contributes to STS and anthropologies of environment and science, demonstrating how planetary health in Punjab hinges on redistributing expertise and enforcing accountability rather than scaling technosolutions.