Punjab today

With about 1.5% of India's land, Indian Punjab grows about a sixth of its wheat and much of its rice, sold to the government at guaranteed prices. The wheat-rice cycle that made it rich is now its trap: rice needs flooded fields, the tubewells pump faster than the rain refills them, and in most blocks the water table falls every year.

Farms are small and mechanised, machinery and fertiliser are bought on credit, and many farmers are deep in debt; thousands have taken their own lives since the 1990s. Each autumn the stubble of the rice harvest is burned, and the smoke drifts over Delhi and Lahore.

Pakistani Punjab grows most of Pakistan's wheat, cotton, sugarcane and rice on the canal system the British built and Pakistan extended. Much of the land is held in large estates by landlord families, and the tenants and labourers who work it are among the country's poorest. Water is short at the tail of the canals, and the same falling groundwater threatens both Punjabs.

Ludhiana knits sweaters and makes bicycles, sewing machines and machine parts; Jalandhar makes sports goods and leather; Mandi Gobindgarh rolls steel. Across the border Faisalabad is Pakistan's textile capital; Sialkot makes footballs for World Cups and surgical instruments for the world's hospitals; Gujranwala makes fans, ceramics and metal goods; Lahore has everything from software to cars.

For a century the Punjab has sent its sons, and now its daughters, abroad. In Doaba there are villages of empty mansions built with money from England and Canada; in the Malwa, towns are full of English-language coaching centres for the students' visa to Canada and Australia. From Pakistani Punjab men go to the Gulf, Britain and Europe. Their remittances build houses and schools; the price is villages of the old, and young people who risk dangerous routes through agents to get out.

Heroin smuggled across the border, and later synthetic drugs and pharmaceutical opioids, spread through Indian Punjab from the 2000s. Surveys, a 2016 film named Udta Punjab and the funerals of young men made it a national scandal and an election issue. Pakistani Punjab, on the same route from Afghanistan, has its own crisis. Both governments promise campaigns; families and village gurdwaras run their own de-addiction centres.