In Punjab’s fields, a prawn cocktail brews
How a landlocked state embraced shrimp farming, turning waterlogged saline land into aquaculture ventures
January 2, 2026
Punjab is etched into India’s imagination as a land of wheat and water—endless fields, heavy ears of grain, the promise of abundance coaxed from the soil. For decades, this promise has been upheld by canals and tube wells, and the steady hum of pumps drawing water upward to keep crops alive.
In central Punjab, the heavy extraction of groundwater has lowered the water table and flushed salts downward into the earth. But in the state’s southwestern districts like Muktsar, Fazilka, Ferozepur, Bathinda, Faridkot and Mansa, groundwater is naturally saline. Unfit for irrigating crops like rice and wheat, this water was extracted far less, allowing the water table to remain high. Over time, soils became waterlogged, salt accumulated, and once-productive fields turned non-arable.
But farmers in Punjab are now finding pride in practising an innovative kind of farming on land once written off as barren—aquaculture. Lakhwinder Singh from Malout in the Muktsar district was the state’s first farmer to cultivate shrimp in a landlocked state. What started as one farmer's experiment now occupies over a thousand acres of blue shrimp ponds in inland Punjab.
Text by Harshita Kale
“Shrimp farming in Punjab is smartly utilising saline land—which would otherwise fetch no income—as a medium to cultivate a profitable aquaculture product.”
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