Punjab, Holding 1.5 Percent of India's Land, Supplied 119 Lakh Tonnes of the 300 Lakh Tonnes of Wheat Government Agencies Bought in 2025-26

Government agencies bought 119.19 lakh tonnes of wheat from farmers in Punjab in the 2025-26 season, out of 299.75 lakh tonnes bought across India, the Ministry of Agriculture told the Lok Sabha on 28 July 2026. A lakh tonnes is 100,000 tonnes, so Punjab’s figure is 11.9 million tonnes, or 39.8 percent of the national purchase. The state has 1.5 percent of India’s area, according to Punjab Agricultural University, and held 2.3 percent of its people at the 2011 Census.

Population figures below are from 2011, the last completed census. The next one has a reference date of 1 March 2027, PRS Legislative Research notes, and its numbers will replace them.

How the present Punjab came to exist

Partition in 1947 cut the old province in two, and Punjab Agricultural University’s own history shows how that landed on one institution. Its parent, the Punjab Agriculture College at Lyallpur, founded in 1906, was left in Pakistan, re-established in a building of Khalsa College in Amritsar and moved to its present site at Ludhiana in 1957.

The Punjab and Haryana High Court’s own history records that the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 extended the Punjab High Court’s jurisdiction to the Patiala and East Punjab States Union, a former princely union that included Patiala, Nabha and Jind.

The state of today dates from the Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1966 (Act 31 of 1966), in force from 1 November 1966. Section 3 formed Haryana from Hissar, Rohtak, Gurgaon, Karnal and Mahendragarh districts and parts of Ambala, Sangrur and Kharar. Section 4 made Chandigarh a union territory. Section 5 gave Himachal Pradesh the districts of Simla, Kangra, Kulu and Lahaul and Spiti, Nalagarh tahsil and parts of Hoshiarpur and Gurdaspur. Section 6 defines Punjab as what remained and creates a new district, Rupar. The Haryana profile tells the same day from the other side.

The Act set the new Assembly at 87 seats on the appointed day and 104 once elections were held, with a Legislative Council of 40 seats.

How Punjab is governed

The Vidhan Sabha, as the Assembly is called, has 117 seats, PRS records, and the results of its latest election were declared on 10 March 2022. Article 172 gives an Assembly five years from its first meeting. Punjab has one house. Parliament abolished the Legislative Council under the Punjab Legislative Council (Abolition) Act, 1969, effective 7 January 1970, as a footnote to Article 168 records.

Punjab sends 13 members to the Lok Sabha, the number section 23 of the 1966 Act fixed and the number PRS lists today, and seven to the Rajya Sabha under the Fourth Schedule. The 2011 Census counted 20 districts. The state cabinet approved Malerkotla, carved out of Sangrur, as the 23rd on 2 June 2021, The Tribune reported.

Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh share one court, the High Court of Punjab and Haryana, created by section 29 of the 1966 Act. The court’s own history says it started functioning at Chandigarh in 1954 and that Jawaharlal Nehru formally inaugurated its building on 19 March 1955.

Punjabi is one of the 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule. The Punjab Official Language Act, 1967 was amended in 2008, with the Governor’s assent on 27 October 2008, so that work in civil and criminal courts below the High Court and in state government offices is done in Punjabi. A 2021 amendment, Act 11 of 2022, added fines for officials who break the rule: Rs 500 for a first violation, up to Rs 2,000 for a second and up to Rs 5,000 for a third.

What its farms and economy produce

Punjab Agricultural University at Ludhiana was set up in 1962 on the American land-grant pattern, under an Act the Punjab Legislature passed on 17 October 1961, its 2012 compendium says. Wheat varieties PV 18, Kalyansona and Sonalika, released in 1966, 1967 and 1968, came from Mexican material the university received in 1963, and the Centre awarded it Rs 100 crore in 2006 for its contribution to the Green Revolution. The compendium credits Punjab with up to 22 percent of the country’s wheat and 11 percent of its rice, and says wheat output rose 10.3 times and rice output nearly 50 times over the university’s first 50 years. It calls the university “the Mother of Green Revolution”, which is its own claim. The piece on M. S. Swaminathan covers the national story.

The Lok Sabha table gives the present scale. In 2025-26 Punjab supplied 119.19 lakh tonnes of wheat, worth Rs 28,903 crore at the minimum support price the government pays, and 156.50 lakh tonnes of paddy, the unmilled rice grain. The paddy was 18.7 percent of the 835.10 lakh tonnes bought nationally and was worth Rs 37,388 crore. Over the five seasons from 2021-22 its wheat purchases ranged from 96.45 to 132.22 lakh tonnes and its paddy from 156.50 to 187.28.

PRS, summarising the Punjab Economic Survey 2025-26 for the March 2026 budget, puts per capita income in 2025-26 at Rs 2,30,523 against Rs 2,19,575 for India. Agriculture made up 23 percent of the state’s output, manufacturing 29 percent and services 48 percent. The economy grew 6.1 percent in real terms against 7.4 percent for India, while agriculture shrank 2.5 percent. The budget projects gross state domestic product, the value of everything produced in the state, at Rs 9,80,635 crore in 2026-27.

Outstanding liabilities are estimated at 45.1 percent of that figure at the end of 2026-27. Power subsidies are budgeted at Rs 15,550 crore, 12.3 percent of revenue receipts, with half going to farm use.

What sets Punjab apart

At the 2011 Census 57.69 percent of Punjab’s people, 16,004,754 of 27,743,338, were Sikh and 38.49 percent were Hindu. No other state or union territory has a Sikh majority, with Chandigarh next at 13.1 percent, and Punjab held 76.8 percent of the 20,833,116 Sikhs counted in India. Scheduled Castes, the communities the Constitution lists for affirmative action, were 31.94 percent of residents, the highest share of any state or union territory. The state was 37.5 percent urban, literacy among those aged seven and over was 75.84 percent, and there were 895 women for every 1,000 men.

Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, is in Amritsar. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, which manages Sikh shrines, says work on the sacred tank and the town began together in 1570, that Guru Arjan designed the temple and supervised its building, and that Hazrat Mian Mir of Lahore laid the foundation stone in December 1588. The temple has a door on each of its four sides.

Punjab is also the only state the Constitution’s emergency provisions name. A proviso to Article 356 treats the three-year limit on the Proclamation issued for Punjab on 11 May 1987 as five years. Parliament inserted a Punjab-only Article 359A in 1988 and omitted it from 6 January 1990.

The Defence Ministry told the Lok Sabha on 10 December 2021 that the Punjab Regiment was raised in 1705, the Sikh Regiment in 1846 and the Sikh Light Infantry in 1941. The same reply says all citizens are eligible for Army recruitment whatever their class, creed, region or religion, and that no regiment has been raised for a particular community or region since Independence.

Chandigarh and the river waters, from both sides

Chandigarh became a union territory on 1 November 1966 under section 4, and both states have claimed it since. The Punjab Vidhan Sabha resolved on 1 April 2022 that the Centre should transfer it to Punjab immediately, arguing, The Tribune reported, that when a state is divided its capital normally stays with the parent state and that central service rules and changes to board postings erode Punjab’s rights. The Haryana Vidhan Sabha answered on 5 April 2022 that the proposal was not acceptable to the people of Haryana, that Haryana keeps its right to the city as joint capital and that Hindi-speaking areas of Punjab should go to Haryana. The Chandigarh profile sets out the city’s administration and the full record.

The Haryana resolution also demanded completion of the Satluj Yamuna Link canal, which carries the dispute over the rivers. Sections 78 to 80 of the 1966 Act divided Punjab’s rights in the Bhakra, Nangal and Beas projects among the successor states and created a Bhakra Management Board with representatives of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh, renamed the Bhakra Beas Management Board once the Beas works joined it.

An agreement of 31 December 1981 among Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan reallocated the Ravi and Beas waters, 17.17 million acre feet in all, and provided for the canal. On 15 January 2002 the Supreme Court ordered Punjab to make its stretch functional within a year. Punjab passed a law in 2004 ending its water agreements, and the President asked the Court for its opinion in a reference dated 22 July 2004. The Court gave it on 10 November 2016 and wrote that “all the questions referred to this Court are answered in the negative”. Punjab had argued that circumstances had changed, that river flows had fallen and that a tribunal should revisit the shares. Haryana had argued that a state cannot cancel a court’s decree by passing a law. The river water disputes explainer places the case in the wider system.

What comes next

The Central Ground Water Board’s 2024 assessment puts Punjab’s annual groundwater extraction at 27.66 billion cubic metres against an extractable 17.63 billion, a stage of extraction of 156.87 percent. It rates 115 of 153 assessment units, 112 blocks and three urban areas, as over-exploited. The 2026-27 budget, PRS notes, includes a 10-year horticulture programme with the Japan International Cooperation Agency that aims to raise the acreage under fruit and vegetables by 300 percent by 2035.

Seats are the other open item. The Constitution holds each state’s Lok Sabha seats to 1971 population figures until the first census after 2026. PRS’s table projects that sharing 543 seats on 2011 population would give Punjab 12 seats instead of 13, and that enlarging the House by half would give it 19. A bill to move to 2011 figures was introduced on 16 April 2026, and the seat-sharing explainer follows what happened to it. Census 2027 has a reference date of 1 March 2027, and the Assembly elected in 2022 completes its five-year term in 2027.