Author’s photo
From DDLJ to Udta Punjab
Punjab occupied an outsized space in my childhood map of India.
My first cycle came from the Atlas factory in Ludhiana, and my first watch shared the HMT brand with the tractors that sowed the seeds of the green revolution. As a 6 year old, I was taken on a pilgrimage to one of the temples of modern India, where a silent lift winched us up to the ramparts of the Bhakra dam, and my little being was overwhelmed by the power of water coursing down its concrete slopes, into canals swollen with surging streams of turquoise.
When we drove north along the Grand Trunk Road, my father would pull the black Ambassador into the shade of a mango tree by the edge of the Sirhind canal, and we would drink chilled lassi from a Verka milk parlour. At the Anandpur Sahib gurudwara, along with the kara prasad, we ingested tales of Sikh valour and sacrifice; my compressed view of history saw an unbroken line of proud martyrdom from the Gurus Arjun Dev and Tegh Bahadur, to Shaheed Bhagat Singh.
Dara Singh, who never lost a wrestling match, grew up in Amritsar, and our only Air Marshal, Arjan Singh, was born in the same Punjab town as my father, Lyallpur. My grandmother’s phulkari tapestries were her last material link to her Punjabi heritage, and our romantic notions of Punjab were doubtless watered by her nostalgia, but we weren’t alone in our fealty - Bollywood Bhangra rocked clubs in Bradford and British Columbia, and by the 90s, wedding processions in Kumaon and Kolkatta succumbed to the earthy rhythm of the dhol. When DDLJ (Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge) lit up a thousand screens with the romance of Raj and Simran, the mustard fields of the Punjab (even if shot in Gurgaon) painted the state in a golden hue.
From DDLJ, in 1995, it was a scant twenty one years to Udta Punjab, in 2016. From a land of sturdy farmers and dupatta-clad beauties, to the loss of hope and the desperation of drugs. There was more than a fragment of truth in both these pieces of narrative fiction, and the arc of the Punjab economy is a good way to track this slide.
In 1981, the per capita income of the Punjabi led the nation, underpinned not just by glistening canals and tractor trolleys piled high with wheat, but also by steel yards and thousands of engineering factories. Punjabi families which had made good in Canada and the UK sent money home, and funded a rash of concrete houses with roof-top water tanks shaped after falcons and footballs. But while the rest of India moved on, Punjab, Shekhar Gupta wrote, is trapped in its “boisterous stereotype….has forgotten its entrepreneurial energy, its competitive spirit.”
In Amritsar last week, I was appalled to see crumbling roads, puddles of stagnant water, unfinished malls, and the overgrown lawns of the Company Bagh, that once was home to the summer palace of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. A newly renovated museum sits in the center of what was once a garden laid out with Mughal symmetry, watered by channels and fountains. To get there, we had to pick our way through heaps of litter and sludge, along a roughly bricked path, then edge past tented police having their mid-morning chai.
I am hardly unfamiliar with small-town squalor in India, but having been elevated that dawn by the majesty of the Golden Temple, the urban landscape of Amritsar sent me scurrying to my hotel room, in search of the numbers that paint the reality of Punjab’s economy.
Since the turn of the century, Punjab has grown more slowly than the rest of the nation, with the exception of Manipur. Both border states, both scourged by drug addiction. Today, its per capita income sits smack in the middle of the league of Indian states, below Uttarakhand, Tamil Nadu and Mizoram, and way below Haryana, once its poorer half, and now at Number 5, the most prosperous of the larger states. Haryana has hugely benefited by its proximity to Delhi, by the glass towers that house regional offices of the Fortune 500, and by the Maruti-fuelled automobile cluster that stretches all the way to Manesar.
But Punjab has scored its own goals too, failed to attract large industry, or create clusters of excellence in the service sector. Contributing 25% of the state’s domestic product, agriculture plays a larger role in Punjab than in India as a whole, where it is now below 20%. Unemployment, especially among the youth, is high, and the Agniveer scheme has put paid to the dreams of millions of young Punjabi men to find a career in the forces. While the Punjab govt has invested heavily in school infrastructure, learning outcomes lag the rest of the nation, and a 2019 study of schools* across the nation ranked Punjab near the bottom, at No. 27.
At Amritsar airport, our flight to Delhi had its share of Kanada Punjabis, well-heeled families speaking in a patois of North American English and Punjabi. How much are they contributing to the Punjab economy, I wondered. Not a lot - Punjab only receives 2% of the 90 billion dollars that the Indian diaspora sends home every year. That translates to roughly 5,000 rupees per resident of Punjab. Kerala, though it has lost its leadership of remittance rankings, fetches 20,000 rupees per resident, roughly the same as Maharashtra, which now accounts for 30% of remittances from abroad. The remittance number that surprised me most was for Delhi, which receives almost as much money from Indian expatriates as Kerala. Divided by a smaller population, ech Delhi resident now attracts 30,000 rupees a year from family living abroad.
This drop in the share of remittance for Kerala and Punjab, and the gain for Maharashtra and Delhi, suggests a shift in the pattern of overseas employment for Indians - from farmers, construction labour and taxi drivers, to software engineers and corporate leaders. Unless Punjab is able to realign itself to the shifting realities of the global economy, it will continue to lag.
The state of its public finances do not hold up much hope of the government taking the leadership in this change. State government debt is the highest in the nation, at 53% of the state’s GDP. The percentage of the state’s revenue ‘committed’ to salaries, pensions and other administrative expenses, is also the highest for all Indian states, at 47%. Punjab’s government finances have run out of wiggle room, perhaps out of time. It is the recognition of this reality that led Punjab’s farmers to the forefront of the agitation against the farm laws two years ago.
Though the central government may have back-tracked for the time being, the current level of farm subsidy - of which Punjab is a major recipient - is no longer sustainable for the national exchequer. As the national government reins in support for Punjab farmers, the state will have to reinvent itself - or the land of prosperity and hospitality, of bhangra and rich creamy lassi, will become a pale memory.
The Golden Temple gives me hope, though. In 1984, its hallowed precincts had turned into an armoury, an epicentre of revolt against the nation that housed it. Today, in the early morning light, it has the allure of a movie set, the grace of myriad prayers and a million hands stretched in service - swabbing the floors, polishing the gilt, offering the kara prasad. Every day, over a hundred thousand people of every religion, every region, visit the Golden Temple, more than any other site on Indian soil. The crowded markets that surround it have been re-organised into a broad plaza, with paved paths and attractive facades.
When you leave the Golden Temple, it is with songs of joy, shabads of upliftment. It is my fondest hope that those prayers radiate through the Punjab, to bring it the material prosperity that should be every human’s in the 21st century.
Since Vietnam and Reagan Raj and his undeclared war against the Sandanistas in Nicaragua, America has used unconventional means to finance wars. In case of Afghanistan war, heroin exports were a major source of indirect funding of the war—the money kept local powerful Afghan feudals happy while American troops provided security and logistical support for the trade. The consumers of this dangerous illicit commodity stretches from Udta Punjab to God’s own country in the South to seedy alleys in European cities and the homeless in LA. That’s also a major portion of the cost of Afghanistani war, not just the trillions spent by US taxpayers and millions of lives lost.
Another superb read Sir.
In addition to various reasons, so immaculately listed by you, which are ailing the growth of economy of Punjab, another thing which I noticed, in my home town Jalandhar (and which may be true for various other districts too) is what I call, domestic brain-drain.
Where we have sufficiently good quantum of higher technical/business education institutes in many a major districts, with one of the finest academia imparting quality education, most of the students graduating from these can't be employed here in Punjab due to lack of industrial and business hubs(as rightly pointed out by you too). All these well groomed and chiseled brains in such institutes, go out to Gurgaon, Banglore , Hyderabad and Pune to contribute.
I happened to attend "Vision Punjab" platform last month which was addressed by CM too in addition to various industrial leaders and here I flagged this issue of domestic Brain Drain. However, the proceedings of the entire event lacked the will to act and the requisite energy to push economy-cart in the right direction.
Now when I read your article, I understood the root cause of why this great state is, what it is.
Thank you so much for such an amazing, yet lucid piece of read. Grateful.