Between the Ripples:
Mapping the lived narratives of the Punjab floods, 2025
Gigamapping Exhibit case-study
This web-exhibit should be cited as the following:
Chawla, K. & Kant, V., Between the Ripples: Mapping the lived narratives of the Punjab floods, 2025. Retrieved from https://home.iitk.ac.in/~vkant/indian-disasters/punjab/
"How can we capture the human stories and lived experiences of 2025 Punjab flood-affected individuals to reveal the disaster's impact and local dimensions at the grassroots level?"
Floods are among the most recurring and devastating disasters in India, causing widespread damage and disruption. The state of Punjab, traversed by the Sutlej, Beas, and Ravi rivers, has endured repeated seasonal floods over the years, triggered by heavy monsoons, snowmelt from the Himalayas, and the worsening effects of climate change. The 2025 Punjab flood was one such high-impact disaster that affected all 23 districts of the state, displacing nearly 20 lakh people, submerging over 1.76 lakh hectares of farmland, and causing widespread damage to infrastructure, agriculture, and livestock, primarily in rural areas.
This exhibit aims to capture the human stories and lived experiences of 2025 Punjab flood-affected individuals to reveal the disaster's impact and local dimensions at the grassroots level. The narratives were captured through interviews with individuals from five villages in Amritsar district in Punjab. Using insights from 21 semi-structured interviews, secondary research, and comparative analysis of the 1988 and 2025 floods, the cognitive, administrative, and informational dimensions of the flood experience were mapped.
Typically, the conventional flood research largely focuses on data collection from administrative and economic perspectives, including hydrological risk, satellite imagery of destruction, statistical data on casualties, displacement, infrastructure damage, and recovery and rehabilitation costs. This needs to be augmented by psychological and cultural dimensions of flood experience, including decision-making heuristics, intergenerational flood memory, and the role of emotions, which remain underexplored. The present exhibit identifies that learnings from flood memories of past events can actively shape present perceptions and decision-making. It further recognizes the importance of the underlying mechanism through which every system functions - information, and how it can degrade due to the multiplicity and duplicity (the broken telephone effect). It also demonstrates the power dynamics within the system that deepen the community's vulnerability.
The gigamap synthesises these findings across all dimensions and highlights the need to bridge the gap between traditional methods of recording disaster impacts and local knowledge to understand destruction and formulate recovery strategies at the grassroots level.
