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After taking a number of financial hits in his family, Gurvinder Singh, a 47-year-old farmer in Gurdaspur, in India’s Punjab state, took a million-rupee mortgage ($11,000) from a personal lender to marry off his eldest daughter. He saved a portion of that and used it to sow 3 acres (1.2 hectares) of paddy.
He positioned his guess on the high-yielding pearl number of fragrant Basmati rice. A great sale would have given him an incomes of practically 1 million rupees per acre ($11,400 per 0.4 hectares).
However now, Singh’s pearl paddy grains lie submerged in floodwater, buried beneath layers of soil and sediment.
“I can not afford this surprising flood at the moment in my life. We’re ruined,” Singh informed Al Jazeera. “This 12 months’s harvest was presupposed to cowl our money owed. However this discipline is a lake now, and I don’t know the way I’ll begin once more.”
Singh additionally needed to briefly go away his dwelling, alongside together with his spouse and two youngsters, after the devastating floods hit their village earlier this month. “What is going to I’m going again to?” he questioned.
‘An enduring repercussion’
Northern Indian states have been reeling beneath the affect of heavy monsoon rains, flash floods and swelling rivers which have submerged complete villages and 1000’s of hectares of farmland.
In Punjab, the place greater than 35 p.c of the inhabitants depends on agriculture, the scenario is especially grim. Right here, farmers are going through the worst floods within the final 4 many years, with giant tracts of paddy fields inundated simply weeks earlier than harvest. The state cultivates rice in practically two-thirds of its whole geographical space.
Gurdaspur, the place Singh lives together with his household, has been among the many worst flood-hit districts in a area that borders three overflowing rivers – Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej – following heavy rainfall in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh state.
At the least 51 folks have died as a consequence of floods in Punjab, and 400,000 extra folks have been displaced.
Singh’s discipline of paddy contributes to India’s $6bn value of Basmati exports. Punjab alone accounts for 40 p.c of the full manufacturing. Throughout the border, Pakistan’s Punjab province, additionally submerged in floods, accounts for 90 p.c of the nation’s Basmati output, producing practically $900m.
Preliminary official estimates put the entire lack of crops in additional than 450,000 acres (182,100 hectares) — nearly the world of Mauritius — of farmland in India’s Punjab. Unbiased agricultural economists informed Al Jazeera that the ultimate affect of floods might be 5 occasions larger than the official estimate.
“The crop is totally spoiled, their equipment is submerged, and the farmers’ homes have washed away,” stated Lakhwinder Singh, director of the Patiala-based Punjabi College’s Centre for Improvement Economics and Improvements Research.
“Punjab’s farmers must restart from scratch. They’d require a whole lot of help and funding from the federal government,” Singh informed Al Jazeera.
To this point, the Punjab authorities – ruled by the Aam Aadmi Occasion (AAP), which is nationally in opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Occasion – has introduced a 20,000 Indian rupees ($230) allowance for farmers who misplaced their crops to flood. However that could be too little to take care of the monumental challenges that lie forward for farmers, stated Singh.
Almost 6 p.c of that basmati rice is shipped to the US, which has slapped a 50 p.c tariff on New Delhi. India has historically been protectionist in direction of its agricultural sector, which employs half of India’s inhabitants (the world’s largest) – a sticking level in commerce negotiations with the administration of US President Donald Trump .
Singh warned the federal government of India towards utilizing the affect of the floods as leverage to liberalise coverage to import meals grains. “The federal government should not push the farmers beneath the bus to cut back the tariffs and get a take care of Trump,” he stated. “These Punjab floods might have an enduring repercussion on the way forward for the agricultural financial system.”
‘All we have now is water’
The quick and daunting problem for Punjab’s farmers can be to eliminate the soil and sediment which have settled over their farmlands, agriculture consultants have stated.
Indra Shekhar Singh, an unbiased agricultural coverage analyst, stated that the extent of the injury might solely be decided after the water receded from the fields. “There’s extreme sedimentation and dirt on farmers’ fields,” he informed Al Jazeera. “One other drawback is levelling the sphere, which is one other value, and readying it for the subsequent season.”
In India, the monsoon or “kharif” crop makes up about 80 p.c of the full rice manufacturing, which is harvested in late September to October. Now, consultants say, Punjab’s farmers are racing towards time to prepared their fields for the subsequent season’s crop, winter’s wheat, which should begin by early November to keep away from yield losses.
“Paddy fields are taking the worst hit within the floods,” stated Shekhar Singh. “Except there’s a miracle, even the conservative numbers recommend heavy losses to farmers.
Apart from the brand new ailments from floodwaters that will have an effect on the standing crops, Shekhar Singh stated that the farmers are additionally gazing a vital dietary disaster for the Rabi season.
India’s farmers depend on urea, containing about 46 p.c nitrogen, as their major fertiliser; the nation can also be the world’s largest importer of urea. However shares have been dwindling: Urea shares dropped from 8.64 million tonnes in August 2024 to three.71 million tonnes in August this 12 months.
This monsoon additionally noticed panic shopping for of urea by farmers throughout a number of Indian states. Now, the floods have struck amid an underlying concern that fertilisers might fall quick for the upcoming Rabi sowing. There was a world surge as effectively in urea costs, rising from $400 per tonne in Could 2025 to $530 per tonne in September.
“This may result in black advertising for fertilisers in impacted states like Punjab, and provides to an current drawback of faux pesticides circulation,” added Shekhar Singh.
Punjabi College’s Singh stated that farmers face a “extended financial disaster for them that may proceed within the coming months”.
In the meantime, Singh, the farmer from Punjab’s Gurdaspur, is pondering what the longer term holds for his household.
He had married off his daughter earlier this 12 months to a different farmer in Amritsar, considered one of Punjab’s largest cities that borders Pakistan. Their farmland is submerged, too.
“I can not journey to go to them even after we are affected by the identical illness,” he stated, earlier than reflecting on the tragedies confronting a area the place two sides of a tense border are grappling with the identical disaster.
“We have been able to struggle a warfare for these rivers,” Singh stated, referring to the hostilities between India and Pakistan earlier this 12 months after an assault in Indian-administered Kashmir killed 26 civilians. India had suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, which distributes the six rivers between the nuclear-armed neighbours, in response – a transfer that Pakistan described as an “act of warfare”.
“All we have now now could be water,” Singh stated.
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