Seventy years taking
water out. The next
seventy putting it back.

The problem, stated plainly

Punjab has irrigated itself into a deficit. Decades of extraction — much of it enabled by wells this company drilled — have drawn the shallow aquifers down faster than rainfall can refill them. Blocks that once yielded at a hundred feet now need six hundred. Wells that served a village for a generation are going dry.

At the same time the water that remains is under attack from above. Farm chemicals, industrial effluent and untreated surface runoff seep downward year after year. The deep aquifers that took centuries to fill are being contaminated in decades.

Both problems have engineering answers. Neither has been applied at the scale Punjab needs.

Sealing the top protects the bottom

An unsealed upper formation is an open channel. Polluted surface water runs straight down the annulus of a badly built well and enters the aquifer that supplies drinking water to an entire district. It is invisible, it is cumulative, and it is completely preventable at the moment of construction.

We seal the upper geological formations on our own wells as standard practice. More importantly, Chairman Gurdarshan Singh Saini has argued before Punjab's water authorities and water boards that this should be mandatory for every well in the state — not a matter of contractor conscience. A single properly sealed well protects the water of everyone drawing from that aquifer. A single badly sealed one poisons it for all of them.

Rainwater harvesting is not optional any more

For most of this company's history the job was extraction. That era is over. Every litre drawn out now has to be answered by a litre put back, and rainwater harvesting is the only mechanism available at the scale the problem demands.

Monsoon rain that runs off rooftops, courtyards, roads and fields into drains is water Punjab has already been given and thrown away. Directed instead into properly designed recharge structures — recharge wells, recharge pits, and the abandoned borewells that already sit in every village — it goes back into the ground where it is needed. The engineering is well understood. What has been missing is the will to require it, and the technical capacity to build it correctly at scale.

We have both the machines and the hydrogeological knowledge to construct recharge infrastructure properly: to know which stratum will actually accept the water, at what rate, and how to filter it so recharge does not become a new route for contamination. A recharge well built without that understanding can do more harm than no well at all.

Deep aquifers, used carefully

Our ability to reach a kilometre is not a licence to drain what is down there. It is a way to relieve pressure on the exhausted shallow aquifers while the recharge work is done — and deep water tapped from virgin, undisturbed strata is cleaner at source, requiring less treatment before it is fit to drink.

Used well, deep drilling buys Punjab time. Used carelessly, it simply moves the crisis down a few hundred metres. We are clear about which of those we intend to be part of.

What we are asking for

Clean groundwater is not only an engineering question. It needs administration: enforceable construction standards, honest well records, monitoring of the water table that is published rather than filed, and recharge obligations attached to extraction. Punjab needs good policy as badly as it needs good drilling.

This company will keep saying so. We have spent seventy years being paid to take water out of the ground, which is precisely what gives us the standing — and the obligation — to argue for how it should be protected.