The Broken Compact

Every argument about the revised abiana has so far been an argument about money: whether the flat annual rate of Rs 2,500 per acre (Rs 1,650 for kharif and Rs 850 for rabi) is too much for farmers in a hard year, or too little for a canal system starved of maintenance.

These are fair questions. But they are not the deepest.

Beneath the question of how much the State may take lies an older one: by what right does it take at all, and on what condition does that right survive?

A water charge is not merely a line of revenue. It is the visible edge of a compact. The size of the charge matters, but it is not the most important thing about it. The more important question is whether the obligation imposed on the farmer is matched by an obligation accepted by the State.

Locke made the point that still matters here: government holds power in trust. It may not take property without consent, given directly or through representation. A trust betrayed is a trust weakened. The irrigator stands in a similar position. He pays abiana as the price of the State’s protection against the one risk he cannot manage alone: the failure of water in a land where rain will not reliably feed a crop. His payment is legitimate for as long as that protection is real.

In most places the social contract is a metaphor, a way of describing a relationship no one ever signed. In Punjab, it is more than metaphor. Here the contract was physically built.

The canal colonies that remade western Punjab from the late nineteenth century onward were not merely irrigation schemes. They were acts of State formation. The State took command of land, rivers and settlement. It carried water to the doabs, granted land and water together, selected cultivators, imposed conditions, collected revenue and built loyalty through control of the canal.

The historian Imran Ali described this as a hydraulic society: one organised around water, authority and settlement. The compact between the State and the cultivator was not inherited from time immemorial. It was surveyed, excavated, aligned, settled and administered. Its terms were written into the distributary, the outlet, the warabandi, the revenue demand and the village map.

This is why an argument about abiana in Punjab is never only about a charge. It is a renegotiation of the founding terms of the arrangement that built much of the province’s agricultural economy.

And it is worth recalling, without nostalgia, what that original bargain understood. The colonial State was extractive. It was not democratic. But it understood something about the mechanics of authority worth understanding, not emulating: if water did not arrive, revenue and control would both weaken. It maintained its works not out of benevolence, but because reliability was central to its own power. Can a self-governing State honour, for better reasons, the half of the bargain that an extractive State honoured for its own ends?

Ibn Khaldun, watching ruling orders rise and decay nearly seven centuries ago, described a pattern that still feels modern: a State is held together not by fear alone but by a shared sense that ruler and ruled remain bound by a moral order, what he called asabiyyah. It weakens when rulers take more and return less. A State that raises the water charge while the canal that justifies it silts up, breaks or fails at the tail is not merely mismanaging a budget. It is enacting, in miniature, the sequence he warned against. Consent, once it starts to weaken, weakens whatever the statute says.

This is why the shift to a flat rate deserves scrutiny. It treats unlike cases alike: a farmer growing a low-water crop and one growing a high-water crop; a farmer at the head and one at the tail; a farmer receiving reliable canal water and one forced onto a tubewell because public supply failed. That is easier to administer. It is not necessarily fairer.

The crop-wise levy it replaced did not fail because differentiation was an irrational principle: different crops do place different demands on water. It failed in execution: it required annual gardawari, functioning canal patwaris, adequate staff, accurate field records and honest reporting. When those foundations weakened, the State did not repair the machinery of knowledge; it simplified the charge instead, asking less of itself rather than more. That is the deeper failure: not the arithmetic of abiana, but the erosion of credible information.

At the tail, this is not theoretical. It is a farmer watching his turn pass through a dry watercourse, then starting a tubewell at private cost while the public system still sends him a bill. It is the difference between entitlement on paper and water in the field. It is the moment when the State appears not as service, but as demand. Farmers understand fairness more quickly than files do.

A State that cannot say what is being cultivated, where water is actually reaching, or which tail reaches are chronically deprived will struggle to justify whatever rate structure it chooses, crop-wise or flat. The common weakness is not the formula. It is the loss of administrative capacity. And a State that cannot produce credible information will struggle to produce credible authority.

None of this means abiana should never be increased. Punjab cannot maintain one of the world’s largest canal irrigation systems on sentiment or nominal charges. Old infrastructure does not maintain itself; silt does not wait for budgetary convenience. A canal system that is under-maintained eventually transfers its costs to the farmer through unreliable supply, groundwater pumping, salinity and greater risk.

So the question is not whether farmers should contribute. They should. The question is whether the State is prepared to make its own contribution equally visible.

If higher abiana is to be morally defensible, it must be accompanied by a visible act of State self-discipline: proof that the increased burden is returning, substantially and transparently, to the system in whose name it is collected. A rate increase without that commitment is merely fiscal. A rate increase with it becomes reform: the State saying, if we ask more of you, you may ask more of us.

That is difficult because our political economy rewards what can be inaugurated, photographed and announced; maintenance prevents failure, but prevention rarely becomes a headline. No one celebrates the breach that did not occur. No ribbon is cut when a minor is desilted before the season rather than repaired after damage. Preventive care is politically unrewarded precisely because its success is the absence of crisis.

Raising the number was the easy half of reform. The harder half is restoring the conditions under which a free man pays without being made to: reliable water, maintained channels, honest assessment, and the visible sense that the exchange is fair.

The farmer has been asked to honour his half of the compact. Now the State must honour its own: not in speeches, but in its canals.