Harike Wetlandਹਰੀਕੇ ਝੀਲ

Harike is where Punjab's river system gathers itself. Just below the point where the Beas flows into the Sutlej, a barrage built in the early 1950s ponds the combined rivers back into a vast, shallow wetland of open water, reed beds and some 33 low islands. At about 4,100 hectares it is the largest wetland in northern India, a Ramsar site since 1990, and in winter one of the great bird spectacles of the subcontinent, when tens of thousands of geese, ducks and waders pour in from Central Asia and Siberia.

How Harike was made

The village of Harike, remembered in the name Harike Pattan, was a ferry crossing on the Sutlej long before it was a wetland. In 1952 and 1953, soon after Partition, engineers built the Harike Barrage just below the Beas and Sutlej confluence to control the combined flow and feed the canal system of the new Indian Punjab. The ponded water spread back over the low floodplain where the two rivers meet, across what are now Tarn Taran, Ferozepur and Kapurthala districts, and created a permanent wetland where seasonal flooding had always made a temporary one.

From the Harike headworks, canals carrying about 29,000 cusecs in total take off towards the southwest: the Ferozepur feeder system, the Makhu feeder and, most famously, the Indira Gandhi Canal, which carries Punjab river water from Harike deep into the Rajasthan desert. Harike is therefore not a leftover of nature but a working piece of engineering that wildlife colonised on a grand scale.

A bird sanctuary of the first rank

The wetland was declared a bird sanctuary in 1982, as the Harike Pattan Bird Sanctuary, covering about 8,600 hectares including the surrounding land. Around 200 bird species are recorded in the winter season alone. Bar-headed geese and greylag geese arrive in thousands, with ruddy shelducks, pintails, shovelers, pochards and great rafts of coots, while the reed beds and islands hold rarer and threatened birds including the yellow-eyed pigeon, Pallas's gull, the Indian skimmer and the white-rumped vulture. Smooth-coated otters hunt the channels, several endangered turtle species live in the shallows, and the wetland supports 26 recorded species of fish.

Harike also produced one of Punjab's most remarkable wildlife records: in December 2007 an Indus river dolphin was sighted in the Beas at Harike, the first confirmed evidence that the endangered dolphin survived in Indian waters, in the population now known to hold on in the Beas between the Pong Dam and this wetland.

What is Harike famous for?

Harike is famous three times over. It is the largest wetland in northern India and a Ramsar site, designated on 23 March 1990 as site number 462 under the name Harike Lake. It is the head of the Indira Gandhi Canal, the longest canal in India, which begins at the Harike Barrage. And it stands at the sangam, the meeting of two of the five rivers of Punjab, the Beas arriving from the northeast and the Sutlej from the hills, a confluence that Punjabis had crossed by ferry for centuries before the barrage made it a lake. The nearest town is Makhu in Ferozepur district, and the wetland is watched over from the barrage road, where in winter the sky over the water is rarely empty.

A wetland fighting weed and silt

Harike's beauty hides a hard struggle. Water hyacinth, the fast spreading weed that chokes still water across India, covers roughly half the wetland's surface, and clearing it is a permanent campaign; in 2000 the Indian Army ran a celebrated weed removal drive here under its Sahyog programme. Untreated effluent from towns and industry upstream, encroachment on the margins, and silt carried down by both rivers steadily shrink and foul the lake; one study estimated the wetland had lost about 30 percent of its area in thirteen years. The Harike Wetland Conservation Mission, set up in 1998, coordinates the fightback, but the wetland's health will always depend on the quality of the water the Beas and the Sutlej deliver to it.

Stand at Harike in January, with the barrage gates below you, the canal heads opening to the desert, and geese settling on the water in their thousands, and you are standing at the hinge of Punjab: two of its five rivers becoming one, a Mughal era ferry crossing turned Ramsar sanctuary, and the starting point of the canal that watered a desert.