The Water's Turn — But Whose?
ਪਾਣੀ ਦੀ ਵਾਰੀ — ਪਰ ਕਿਸ ਦੀ?
ਪਾਣੀ ਦੀ ਵਾਰੀ — ਪਰ ਕਿਸ ਦੀ?
A Public Historical Indictment Published in direct response to "Punjab's ₹1.44 Lakh Crore Water Claim Against Rajasthan," The KBS Chronicle, Substack, March 18, 2026
By Dr. Kanwar Partap Singh Gill, M.D. Forensic Historical Analysis | kpsgill.com | Majha Perspective
Author's Note
This essay is a direct response to K.B.S. Sidhu's March 18, 2026 Substack article on Punjab's water claim against Rajasthan, published in The KBS Chronicle. It is simultaneously a companion document to the Punjab '95 forensic audit published at kpsgill.com — the audit that established, with archival specificity, what Sidhu's office did and did not do as Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar between 1992 and 1996. That audit found that the DC's office possessed both the statutory authority and the institutional proximity to generate accountability for the counterinsurgency's human consequences — and that the public record shows it did not.
This essay applies the same forensic lens to Punjab's water history. It takes Sidhu's article seriously. It concedes what is true in it. And then it does what Sidhu's article cannot: it places the author inside the chronology he is narrating, and asks what his presence there means for the analysis he is now offering.
The two audits form a diptych. Punjab '95 asked: what did the civilian shield do when Punjab was burning? This essay asks: what did the same administrative generation do when Punjab's rivers were being given away? The answer, in both cases, begins with the public record — and ends with what the public record conspicuously does not contain.
Let it be established at the outset, without qualification, that K.B.S. Sidhu's March 18 article contains some of the most lucid publicly available writing on Punjab's water crisis. The historical narrative he constructs — from the Maharaja Ganga Singh arrangement of the 1920s through the 1955 Chief Ministers' conference, the 1976 notification, the 1981 Indira Gandhi Agreement, the 2004 Punjab Termination of Agreements Act, and the Supreme Court's 2016 constitutional reset — is accurate, detailed, and analytically precise. For a reader encountering this history for the first time, it is genuinely valuable.
He is right that the 1955 settlement's allocation — 8 MAF to Rajasthan against 7.20 MAF to undivided Punjab — established, from the very first post-Independence settlement, the pattern of a non-riparian desert state receiving more water than the riparian state through whose territory the rivers flowed. He is right that this pattern hardened rather than softened through the 1981 agreement. He is right that the 2004 Punjab Termination of Agreements Act was constitutional theatre that left Rajasthan's 8.6 MAF entitlement functionally untouched while pointing its rhetorical guns exclusively at Haryana and the SYL. He is right that the Supreme Court's 2016 ruling reset the board to the pre-2004 legal architecture and that only tribunal strategy and Article 131 litigation can produce durable remedy. He is right that Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann's ₹1.44 lakh crore announcement will achieve precisely nothing unless it proceeds from microphone to memorandum, from slogan to suit.
These observations are correct. They deserve to be acknowledged as correct. This essay acknowledges them.
And then this essay does what Sidhu's article is architecturally incapable of doing: it reads his analysis against his career.
Because K.B.S. Sidhu is not a journalist, a professor, or an outside commentator who has spent decades studying Punjab's water crisis from a position of analytical independence. He is a retired IAS officer of the Punjab cadre who occupied, across the decades he is now analyzing, some of the most institutionally consequential positions available to a civil servant in the state. He served as Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar — the district through which the Ravi flows and from whose revenue records any serious legal claim about Punjab's riparian entitlements must be built. He served, eventually, as Financial Commissioner of Revenue — the apex of the state's land, revenue, water, and irrigation management apparatus — the office through which the patwari records, the revenue settlements, the canal allocation accounts, and the historical water usage data of the entire state are ultimately supervised and consolidated.
He is not a witness to Punjab's water failure. He is a participant in the administrative apparatus that produced it.
This distinction is the essay's foundation. Everything that follows builds from it.
Sidhu's most powerful historical observation is about the 1955 settlement. He is right that from the very first post-Independence allocation, the pattern of non-riparian advantage over riparian Punjab was established. The 8 MAF given to Rajasthan versus 7.20 MAF to undivided Punjab is, as he says, the original arithmetic of the betrayal.
What the article does not say — because saying it would require the author to situate himself in the history rather than above it — is that the institutions responsible for challenging and reversing this arrangement were the same institutions through which Sidhu's career ran. The Punjab Revenue Department. The Punjab Irrigation Department. The office of the Financial Commissioner of Revenue. The office of the Deputy Commissioner in district through which the contested rivers flow.
These institutions did not merely observe the water allocation architecture from the outside. They were the instruments through which that architecture operated on the ground. The canal usage records that any serious tribunal challenge would require — the historical flow data, the agricultural demand assessments, the documentation of the downstream consequences of diversion on Punjab's aquifers — were maintained, or not maintained, in exactly the institutional offices that Sidhu's career passed through.
The 1981 Indira Gandhi Agreement, which Sidhu correctly identifies as the central document of the modern water injustice, was signed at a moment when Sidhu was a serving IAS officer of the Punjab cadre. The withdrawal of Punjab's Supreme Court case — filed in 1979 and withdrawn under political pressure in 1981 — was an act of institutional surrender by the same state apparatus in which he served. He was not a bystander to that surrender. He was a serving officer of the state that made it.
This is not a charge of personal culpability for the 1981 agreement. No junior or mid-career officer can be held personally responsible for a decision made at the Chief Ministerial and Prime Ministerial level. The institutional argument is more precise than that: the decisions that produced Punjab's water injustice were made within and through the administrative apparatus in which Sidhu rose, across the decades in which he rose. His article analyzes those decisions as though they were made by someone else, in a system he observed from outside. The forensic reading of his career says otherwise.
The journalist and environmental writer Fred Pearce spent years documenting the global pattern of river depletion. His core finding — developed through fieldwork on the Nile, the Colorado, the Yangtze, the Indus, and the great rivers of South Asia — is deceptively simple: rivers do not run dry because of drought. They run dry because of decisions. Political decisions. Legal decisions. Administrative decisions about who has the right to take water, when, in what quantity, and for whose benefit.
Pearce's documentation of the Indus basin — the basin that feeds Punjab's river system — is particularly relevant to Sidhu's analysis. The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, which allocated the eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej) to India and the western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab) to Pakistan, was itself an act of hydrological engineering at the political level. The eastern rivers that India retained were then allocated internally by exactly the pattern Sidhu documents: political compact over riparian principle, national interest framing over state-level equity, desert irrigation projects over the agricultural sustainability of the riparian state.
What Pearce established — and what is directly applicable to Punjab's situation — is that the communities that bear the cost of water diversion are almost never the communities that attend the allocation meetings. The farmers of Majha, between the Ravi and the Beas, did not sit at the table when 8.6 MAF was allocated to Rajasthan in 1981. The tube wells that now draw from two hundred feet in Tarn Taran district, because the surface water that once sustained them was redirected through the Indira Gandhi Canal toward the Thar, are the physical evidence of a decision made in New Delhi by men who did not need to look at the consequences of what they were signing.
Sidhu's article borrows the moral weight of this dispossession. Its emotional power comes from the accumulated injustice of the farmer watching the water leave. But the article does not apply Pearce's analytical discipline to its own author. Pearce, writing about administrative failures in water management, always asks the same question that his evidence demands: who held institutional authority when the failure was consolidated, and what did they do with it?
That question, applied to Sidhu's career, is the question his article cannot answer.
The most intellectually impressive portion of Sidhu's article is his analysis of the 2004 Punjab Termination of Agreements Act. It is worth engaging with directly and in detail, because it is simultaneously his sharpest insight and his most revealing self-exposure.
He writes, correctly, that the 2004 Act "looked radical in the Assembly; it was conservative where it mattered most — on the flows to the desert." He identifies, with precision, that while the Act nominally terminated all water agreements, it protected "existing utilisation" through existing systems — which meant that Rajasthan's 8.6 MAF continued flowing through the Indira Gandhi Canal while the political theatre was directed entirely at Haryana and the SYL. "The gun was pointed squarely at the Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal and Haryana," he writes. "The largest beneficiary of continuity was Rajasthan."
This is excellent analysis. It is precisely the kind of forensic reading that Punjab's water history has long needed.
Now apply the same forensic reading to the man performing it.
The 2004 Punjab Termination of Agreements Act was passed by a government of which K.B.S. Sidhu was a serving officer. The legislative strategy he now critiques as selective radicalism — radical in the Assembly, conservative where it mattered most — was the strategy pursued by the Punjab administrative apparatus in which he served. The "political thunder" that "concealed a crucial legal compromise," in his own words, was the thunder of the government he was an officer of.
Where is his account of what the administrative apparatus did, from the inside, to flag this compromise? Where is his account of what advice the revenue department gave, what the Financial Commissioner's office noted, what the legal department counseled, when the Act was being drafted in a manner that protected Rajasthan while targeting Haryana? Was the institutional advice consistent with what Sidhu now, in retirement, identifies as the Act's central weakness? Or was the institutional apparatus — including the officers who now diagnose the failure so fluently — part of the machinery that produced the compromise?
These questions are not hostile. They are the questions that any serious administrative audit would ask. And they remain unanswered because Sidhu's article does not acknowledge that they exist.
Sidhu's article describes the Supreme Court's 2016 ruling — which declared the 2004 Act unconstitutional and restored the pre-2004 legal architecture — as the moment that "reset the board." He is right. The 2016 ruling was a constitutional clarification of the highest order: states cannot unilaterally terminate interstate water agreements through legislation. The route to remedy lies through tribunals and original jurisdiction, not through the Vidhan Sabha.
What the article does not disclose is that its author was, in November 2016, the Financial Commissioner of Revenue who signed the executive notification de-notifying the land acquired for the Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal and returning it to original owners. The Supreme Court's ruling came in that same year. The de-notification was Sidhu's administrative act — issued in the same constitutional moment that the Court was defining the limits of unilateral state action on water.
The relationship between these two simultaneous events — the Supreme Court's ruling and the Financial Commissioner's notification — is one of the most important administrative questions in Punjab's recent water history. The Court said states cannot unilaterally terminate water agreements. The Financial Commissioner simultaneously signed an executive notification that, in practical effect, sought to dissolve Punjab's side of the SYL infrastructure through administrative rather than legislative means. The Court subsequently engaged with the de-notification's legal validity.
Sidhu's article, which is ostensibly about the correct legal strategy for Punjab's water claim, does not examine this sequence. It does not ask whether the de-notification he signed was consistent with the constitutional framework the Supreme Court had just articulated. It does not acknowledge his own role in a decision that complicated the legal landscape he is now recommending Punjab navigate.
This is not mere biographical detail. It is the administrative self-portrait that the article's analytical framework demands and cannot provide. An officer who writes about the need for constitutional discipline in water strategy while declining to examine the constitutional questions raised by his own executive action is an officer who has constructed a public identity as the analyst of failures he was part of producing.
The most devastating way to understand Punjab's institutional failure on water is not to describe it in isolation. It is to place it beside the institutional records of the states that were fighting analogous battles and winning, or at least contesting, with genuine institutional seriousness.
The Cauvery dispute — between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, with Puducherry and Kerala as additional parties — is the closest Indian analogue to Punjab's Ravi-Beas situation. Tamil Nadu's position vis-à-vis the Cauvery is structurally similar to Punjab's position vis-à-vis the Ravi and Beas: a historically established downstream entitlement being contested by an upstream state (Karnataka) whose political preferences diverged from its treaty obligations, mediated through the complex machinery of inter-state water law.
What Tamil Nadu built to fight this case was not a press conference strategy. It was an institutional apparatus of formidable sophistication. Across every change of government — from M.G. Ramachandran to J. Jayalalithaa to M. Karunanidhi and back — the Tamil Nadu government maintained continuous institutional engagement with the Cauvery Tribunal through a specialized legal team, a dedicated Water Resources Department bureaucracy assigned specifically to tribunal preparation, and a culture of evidentiary continuity that survived every political transition. The Advocate General's office treated the Cauvery file not as one matter among many but as a strategic institutional priority. Counsel of national distinction — including Fali S. Nariman at critical phases — were retained specifically for this litigation. The state's hydrological data was systematically maintained and legally formatted with tribunal submission in mind.
Karnataka matched this with comparable institutional investment. Senior constitutional counsel, a specialized irrigation department bureaucracy, continuous coordination between the legal team and the technical departments — these are not accidental features of Karnataka's Cauvery strategy. They are the product of institutional decisions, made by specific officers in specific positions, to treat the water case as a matter of state-level strategic priority rather than a file that could be opened when politically convenient and closed when it was not.
Now ask: what did Punjab build?
The Ravi-Beas Tribunal was constituted in 1986 and gave only an interim report in 1987. In the nearly four decades since, it has remained in a state of procedural suspension — without Punjab ever mounting the kind of sustained technical brief that would force it to reconvene with urgency. Sidhu's article correctly identifies this as a failure: "Punjab needs a serious, technical brief before the Tribunal — with updated flow data, groundwater trends, cropping patterns, and climate stress."
This is correct. And the question it raises is the question this essay will not allow to pass unanswered: during the years when Sidhu was Financial Commissioner of Revenue — the officer most directly positioned to supervise the systematic compilation of exactly this kind of evidentiary record — was that record being built? Were the updated flow data being systematically collected and legally formatted? Were the groundwater trend analyses being maintained with tribunal submission in mind? Was the revenue department coordinating with the Irrigation Department and the state legal team to fill the evidentiary gaps that the Tribunal's resumption would require?
The public record does not show that it was. If it was, the documentation exists in Punjab's government files. It should be produced. If it does not exist, the absence is itself the finding — and the finding belongs in Sidhu's article, which recommends the very preparation whose absence during his tenure it will not acknowledge.
Here is the most uncomfortable comparative fact in Sidhu's entire analysis, and the one he declines to address directly: the state that has benefited most from Punjab's institutional failure is not an institutional innocent. Rajasthan has protected its 8.6 MAF allocation with exactly the legal discipline that it knew Punjab was not matching.
The Rajasthan government has maintained, across decades, a consistent and sophisticated institutional engagement with its water rights. The Rajasthan Irrigation Department has maintained records of utilization that would withstand tribunal scrutiny. The state's legal apparatus has continuously tracked the Punjab water dispute and prepared arguments against any reallocation with the discipline of a state that understands its legal exposure and has chosen to address it through institutional preparation rather than rhetorical assertion.
Every acre-foot of Rajasthan's 8.6 MAF allocation rests on two foundations: the legal groundwork Rajasthan's officers built, and the legal groundwork Punjab's officers did not. The second foundation is invisible only so long as Punjab's officers are permitted to analyze the failure without accounting for their own role in it.
Sidhu's article identifies the first foundation — Rajasthan's legal position — with impressive clarity. It does not identify the second, because identifying it would require the author to appear in his own analysis.
The Advocate General of Punjab is not a ceremonial office. Across the states that have fought and won interstate water cases, the AG's office has been the institutional pivot around which legal strategy is organized: coordinating between the technical departments that maintain the evidentiary record and the specialized counsel who present it before tribunals and courts. In Tamil Nadu, this coordination was continuous. In Karnataka, it was continuous. In Gujarat, during the Narmada proceedings, it was continuous. The institutional memory of the case — the understanding of where the state's legal arguments were strong, where they were vulnerable, what hydrological data needed to be strengthened, what historical records needed to be retrieved and formatted — was maintained across administrations precisely because the AG's office, coordinating with the technical departments, treated it as a matter of institutional continuity.
What is the Punjab record?
Fali S. Nariman appeared for Tamil Nadu in the Cauvery case. Soli Sorabjee appeared in various capacities in interstate water proceedings involving Karnataka and other states. Who appeared for Punjab, with equivalent institutional backing, before the Ravi-Beas Tribunal? What senior water-law counsel has been retained at the state level, continuously, with the institutional support of a prepared evidentiary record from the Revenue and Irrigation Departments?
The public record is not encouraging. Punjab's engagement with the Ravi-Beas Tribunal has been, by the observable record, episodic rather than continuous — responding to procedural developments rather than driving them, preparing arguments when urgency demanded rather than building the evidentiary foundation that would allow sustained offensive litigation.
Sidhu's article recommends that Punjab prepare "a serious, technical brief before the Tribunal — with updated flow data, groundwater trends, cropping patterns, and climate stress." This is the correct recommendation. But the Financial Commissioner of Revenue — the officer who supervised the state's land and water records during his tenure — is the officer from whose office the foundational data for exactly this brief should have been emerging, systematically and continuously, across his years of service. The recommendation in the article is, in a precise institutional sense, the recommendation that his own tenure was positioned to begin fulfilling, and did not.
The opening of Sidhu's article discusses the Maharaja Ganga Singh arrangement of the 1920s with the precision of a historian and the detachment of a man who has read the file. But the file does not contain everything. The file does not contain the farmer in Tarn Taran who drilled his tube well to thirty feet in 1975 and to two hundred feet in 2020, because the canal water that once reached his fields has been progressively diverted through the Indira Gandhi Canal toward the Thar. The file does not contain the woman in Gurdaspur drawing groundwater with electricity that the state subsidizes because the alternative — admitting that the surface water which should reach her fields has been allocated elsewhere — is politically more costly than the subsidy. The file contains the 8.6 MAF figure. It does not contain the aquifer.
This is Majha's testimony, and it is the moral ground from which any serious analysis of Punjab's water crisis must speak. Not as the backdrop to a legal argument. As the evidence of what the legal failure cost — accumulated across the same decades that K.B.S. Sidhu's career ran through its various positions of authority.
Fred Pearce's central finding about river systems globally — that the communities that pay the price of water diversion are almost never the communities represented at the allocation meeting — applies with devastating precision to the farmers of Majha. They were not at the 1955 Chief Ministers' conference. They were not at Indira Gandhi's 1981 negotiating table. They were not consulted when the 2004 Act protected Rajasthan's existing utilization while targeting Haryana. They were not asked whether the 2016 de-notification of SYL land was consistent with the constitutional framework the Supreme Court had just articulated.
They were at their tube wells. They are still at their tube wells. The wells are deeper now.
Sidhu's article speaks for them, in the sense that it accurately identifies the injustice they bear. But it speaks for them from a position of institutional remove that the essay's analytical framework does not acknowledge. The man who analyzes the injustice from a Substack newsletter is the same man who occupied, across the years of the injustice's deepening, the institutional positions from which the response to that injustice should have been organized.
The Majha tradition calls this bedavaa — the formal disavowal, the distancing from one's own position in a history one was part of making. The Khalsa does not honor bedavaa. It honors accounting.
There is a technique in institutional accountability analysis — developed through the great truth commission processes of the late twentieth century, from South Africa to Chile to Rwanda — that this essay employs here. It is the technique of the administrative audit moment: the precise reconstruction of what a specific officer's statutory and institutional obligations were at a specific moment of crisis, followed by the question of what the public record shows about whether those obligations were discharged.
Apply this technique to K.B.S. Sidhu's tenure as Financial Commissioner of Revenue, Punjab, at the moment of the Ravi-Beas Tribunal's procedural stasis.
The Ravi-Beas Tribunal gave its interim report in January 1987. It then entered a period of procedural suspension that has now lasted nearly four decades. During this period, the fundamental premise of the 1955 and 1981 allocations — the existence of a "surplus" from the Ravi and Beas systems sufficient to allocate 8.6 MAF to Rajasthan without materially harming Punjab — has been fundamentally altered by the hydrological reality Sidhu's own article documents: the assessed availability has fallen from 17.17 MAF to approximately 14.3 MAF on more recent flow series. The "surplus" from which Rajasthan's allocation was drawn has effectively disappeared.
This is the single most important legal argument available to Punjab in any tribunal challenge: the factual premise of the allocation has collapsed, and the allocation must therefore be revisited. But this argument depends entirely on the quality of the hydrological evidence Punjab can present — the updated flow data, the groundwater depletion analysis, the documentation of changed agricultural demand patterns, the evidence that the "surplus" no longer exists.
The Financial Commissioner of Revenue is the officer through whose office this evidentiary record — or the absence of it — was built or not built during the relevant years. The question that Sidhu's article does not ask — the question this essay is asking — is whether the Punjab Revenue Department, under the Financial Commissioner's supervision, was systematically building this record with tribunal submission in mind.
If it was, the documentation exists. It should be produced.
If it was not, the absence is the finding. And the finding belongs not only in a Supreme Court brief. It belongs in the institutional accounting that a former Financial Commissioner of Revenue owes Punjab when he tells Punjab what it should do now.
K.B.S. Sidhu's March 18 article concludes with a coherent three-pillar water doctrine for Punjab: riparian principle and equity, constitutional method, and strategic integration. These three pillars are correctly identified. The constitutional method pillar — commit to fighting the case before the Ravi-Beas Tribunal and the Supreme Court in original jurisdiction rather than through legislative self-help — is exactly right. The strategic integration pillar — demand a seat at the table whenever the Union redraws the hydrological map, from the Yamuna basin to the Indus architecture — is exactly right. The riparian principle pillar — no non-riparian state should draw more from Punjab's rivers than Punjab itself, and where historic arrangements require such transfers they must be compensated — is exactly right.
The article also makes a specific, valuable, and underappreciated argument about the Shahpur Kandi dam and the Ujh Multipurpose Project — the infrastructure on Punjab's northern flank that could, if completed, allow full utilization of the eastern river quota that India retained under the Indus Waters Treaty and that is now partially flowing unutilized to Pakistan. This is genuinely sophisticated policy analysis. It connects Punjab's water situation to the larger geopolitical context of the treaty's suspension and India's renewed interest in maximizing its Indus utilization. It is the kind of integrated strategic thinking that Punjab's political class has rarely demonstrated.
None of this analysis is wrong. All of it is worth publishing. The essay you are reading does not dispute any of it.
What this essay disputes is the analytical posture in which it is offered.
The three-pillar water doctrine that Sidhu articulates in retirement is a doctrine that his institutional positions across his career were specifically equipped to begin implementing. The riparian principle argument is exactly the argument that the Financial Commissioner of Revenue's office was positioned to build into the evidentiary record of the revenue department. The constitutional method argument is exactly the argument that the legal department's coordination with the AG's office — supervised through the revenue apparatus — was positioned to translate into the technical brief before the Ravi-Beas Tribunal. The strategic integration argument is exactly the argument that a senior IAS officer in the revenue and water management hierarchy was positioned to make, from inside the government, across the years when the Union was redrawing Punjab's hydrological options.
The wisdom of the doctrine is not the question. The question is: during the years when K.B.S. Sidhu possessed the institutional authority to advance each pillar of this doctrine from inside the machinery of government, what is the public record of his doing so?
This question is not answered in his article. This essay is asking it publicly, because the public interest demands it.
There is a specific kind of obligation that attaches to senior public servants who write about the institutional failures of the systems they ran. It is not the obligation of confession, or of self-flagellation, or of public apology. It is the obligation of transparency — the production of the institutional record that would allow the public to assess the relationship between the analysis now offered in retirement and the institutional record of the career that preceded it.
Sidhu's article recommends that Punjab prepare a serious technical brief for the Ravi-Beas Tribunal, with updated flow data, groundwater trends, and climate stress analysis. This is the correct recommendation. The institutional corollary is equally correct and has not been offered: the production of whatever record exists from the Financial Commissioner of Revenue's office — the internal memoranda, the departmental notes, the coordination correspondence with the Irrigation Department and the AG's office — that would show what institutional groundwork was or was not being laid for exactly this brief during Sidhu's tenure.
If that groundwork was being laid, its documentation is a contribution to Punjab's case. It should be produced and published.
If it was not being laid, the absence is part of the institutional history of why Punjab does not have the brief it needs. It should also be acknowledged.
The post-retirement expertise that Sidhu offers Punjab is valuable. It is not sufficient. The public intellectual who has held the institutional positions he has held owes the public not only his analysis but his accounting. The accounting is what the article does not contain.
Addressed to: The Government of Punjab; the Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms; the Punjab Revenue Department; the Punjab Irrigation Department; and any repository currently holding the administrative records relevant to the following requests. These demands are presented in the public interest and in the tradition of institutional accountability that the Right to Information Act, 2005 is designed to support.
DEMAND ONE — The Financial Commissioner's Water File: The internal correspondence, departmental orders, commissioner's instructions, coordination records, and noting files of the office of the Financial Commissioner of Revenue, Punjab, for the period during which K.B.S. Sidhu occupied that position, specifically as they relate to: (a) the preparation of Punjab's evidentiary record for Ravi-Beas Tribunal proceedings; (b) coordination with the state legal department or externally retained water-law counsel on the SYL dispute or related riparian claims; (c) revenue record audits relating to Punjab's historical water usage and entitlement claims before tribunals or courts.
DEMAND TWO — The Amritsar District Water Record: The district-level revenue and irrigation records of Amritsar district for the period May 1992 to August 1996, specifically: (a) canal usage and allocation records for districts adjacent to the Ravi; (b) groundwater extraction data maintained by the revenue department; (c) any documentation of the DC's office's coordination with the Irrigation Department or state legal apparatus regarding Punjab's water dispute during this period.
DEMAND THREE — The SYL De-Notification File: The complete administrative file — including all noting, legal advice received, interdepartmental coordination, and correspondence with the Union government and the Punjab Advocate General — from which the November 2016 executive notification de-notifying SYL land was generated. The Supreme Court's subsequent engagement with this notification's legal validity makes this file a matter of active public interest in any assessment of Punjab's current legal strategy.
DEMAND FOUR — The Ravi-Beas Tribunal Coordination Record: All records of coordination between the Punjab Revenue Department, the Punjab Irrigation Department, and the AG's office regarding preparation of Punjab's technical brief before the Ravi-Beas Tribunal, for the period 1992–2020. The Tribunal's interim report dates to 1987; what institutional preparation was made for its resumption in the decades that followed?
DEMAND FIVE — The Annual Confidential Reports: The APARs for K.B.S. Sidhu across his tenures as DC Amritsar and Financial Commissioner of Revenue, specifically any performance assessments relating to water management, revenue record preparation, or institutional engagement with Punjab's riparian rights.
These demands are not hostile to K.B.S. Sidhu personally. They are the minimal requirements of serious institutional accountability. A state that claims to champion Punjab's water rights cannot simultaneously resist the production of records that would illuminate how those rights were managed — and by whom — across the decades when managing them properly was most consequential.
Sidhu's article closes with the observation that "invoices without plaints do not yield decrees, and decrees without enforcement do not yield money." This is correct, and it is among the sharpest lines in the piece. The Chief Minister's ₹1.44 lakh crore announcement is an invoice. It requires a plaint to become a decree. It requires enforcement mechanisms to become money. Moving from press conference to Article 131 litigation is not a simple escalation. It is an institutional transformation that requires the kind of evidentiary preparation, legal sophistication, and bureaucratic discipline that Sidhu's article correctly identifies as the missing element in Punjab's water strategy.
What Sidhu's article does not say — and what this essay is saying, plainly, on behalf of the farmers of Majha and the public interest in genuine institutional accountability — is this:
The evidentiary preparation that would make the plaint possible was not built across the decades when the officers who now recommend it held the positions from which it could have been built. The legal sophistication that would make the Article 131 litigation credible was not developed across the years when the Financial Commissioner's office and the AG's coordination could have been developing it. The institutional transformation from grievance to legal discipline that Sidhu now recommends was not advanced, so far as the public record shows, during the administrative careers of the men who are now doing the recommending.
This is not a statement about individual failure. It is a statement about institutional culture — about the culture of a Punjab IAS cadre that has, across these decades, consistently produced more eloquent post-retirement analysis of Punjab's failures than institutional engagement with those failures while in office.
K.B.S. Sidhu is one of this generation's most capable and articulate members. That is precisely why the standard this essay holds him to is high. The analysis he offers is too valuable to be discounted. The institutional accounting he owes — the honest engagement with what his career contributed to, or failed to contribute to, in the specific positions he held across the water-loss years — is too important to be waived.
Punjab does not need only retired wisdom. Punjab needs retired wisdom accompanied by retired honesty. The wisdom says: here is what must be done. The honesty says: here is what was not done, by the institutions I ran, during the years I ran them. Here is the gap between my analysis and my record. Here is what I would do differently, and what I failed to do that cannot now be undone.
That document has not been written. Until it is, the article that was written — however accurate in its diagnosis of Punjab's water crisis — remains structurally incomplete.
The rivers between the Ravi and the Beas are history, sacrifice, and memory. The tube wells that draw from two hundred feet in Tarn Taran are the physical record of decisions made in offices that K.B.S. Sidhu occupied. The farmers who pay the electricity bills are the human cost of the institutional gap between what he knew and what the public record shows he did with that knowledge.
The accounting is what remains.
FINAL VERDICT — ONE SENTENCE
A man who held the files when Punjab's rivers were given away, and who now explains with great clarity what should have been done with them, owes Punjab not only his expertise but his archive — and an honest accounting of the distance between the two.
Dr. Kanwar Partap Singh Gill, M.D., is a practicing family medicine physician and native of Amritsar, now based in Fresno, California.