One of Punjab's most battered waterways is finally getting a shot at redemption. The Chief Minister's Office of Punjab announced on Sunday, 1 November 2026 that Chief Minister Bhagwant Singh Mann has constituted a special high-level committee to address the long-pending pollution crisis of the Buddha Nullah in Ludhiana district — with a hard deadline of 15 days to submit a comprehensive restoration blueprint.

The man chosen to lead the mission

Heading the committee is Sant Balbir Singh Seechewal — environmentalist, Rajya Sabha member, and the man who once turned the choked Kali Bein rivulet into a living waterway using volunteer labour in the early 2000s. That earlier effort drew national attention and established Seechewal as the most credible river-revival voice in Punjab. Placing him at the helm is a deliberate signal: this is not a routine bureaucratic review, it is an assignment handed to someone with skin in the game.

The Chief Minister directed the committee to submit its report within 15 days so that, as the official statement put it, 'ਠੋਸ ਅਤੇ ਸਮਾਂਬੱਧ ਕਾਰਵਾਈ' — 'concrete and time-bound action' — can be ensured for restoring the Buddha Nullah to its historic original state.

Why Buddha Nullah has become Punjab's most urgent drain

The Buddha Nullah snakes through Ludhiana, Punjab's largest industrial city, carrying decades of untreated effluents — from dyeing units, electroplating workshops, and textile mills — before emptying into the Sutlej River. Ludhiana's industrial growth made it the commercial backbone of the state; it also made the Nullah the dumping ground of that prosperity. Residents living alongside it have long reported foul odour, contaminated groundwater, and skin ailments. The Sutlej, which millions of farmers downstream depend on for irrigation, bears the downstream cost.

The problem is not new. Multiple governments over multiple decades have announced clean-up drives. What makes this announcement structurally different — at least on paper — is the combination of a named expert chair with a proven track record and a publicly stated 15-day reporting window that creates accountability pressure from day one.

Punjab's pattern of expert-led interventions

The move fits a broader pattern under the Bhagwant Mann government of routing chronic environmental problems through specialist committees rather than leaving them solely with the state bureaucracy. Seechewal's Kali Bein model — community mobilisation, sediment removal, restoration of natural flow — is now being invoked for a far more complex, industrially polluted urban drain. Scaling that model to the Buddha Nullah, which flows through a densely populated city with active industrial discharge, will test both the committee's ambition and the government's follow-through on enforcement against polluting units.

The real watch-point is not the report — it is what comes after: the funding order, the industrial compliance timeline, and whether the government sustains political will once the announcement cycle moves on.