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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 traces how multiple water crises in Punjab are produced and governed through what I term a hydroscape: an assemblage of waters, infrastructures, institutions, scientific practices, and political-economic relations linked through water's material flows. Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, I follow water across multiple sites across Punjab.

I argue that groundwater depletion, toxic contamination, wastewater disposal, and environmental health harms are commonly treated as separate problems by state institutions and expert systems. Yet following water ethnographically reveals how these conditions are materially interconnected. Colonial canal irrigation, postcolonial Green Revolution agriculture, industrial expansion, wastewater infrastructures, and regulatory regimes have together produced a hydroscape in which water is simultaneously scarce, toxic, and, during extreme events, dangerously abundant.

Drawing on STS scholarship on hydrosocial relations, infrastructure, and pollution, I show how technocratic interventions increasingly focus on managing flows rather than limiting extraction or contamination at source. Groundwater depletion is addressed through deeper extraction and alternative water supplies; pollution is addressed through treatment infrastructures and permissible thresholds. Such interventions redistribute harms while preserving existing relations of production and authority.

Against these governance logics, communities living alongside the Buddha Nala mobilise sensory, experiential, and embodied forms of evidence to contest official claims of remediation. Their struggles highlight the limits of expert-led water governance and point instead toward a reparative politics of water justice grounded in accountability, situated knowledge, and the inseparability of environmental health and social justice.