Bet is the Punjabi word for the low land inside a river's flood plain, between the natural levees, which the river takes in a big year and enriches when it goes back.
Bet soil is the best in Punjab and bet farming is the most precarious. A holding there can carry two crops of exceptional yield and be under two metres of water in August.
Villages in the bet are built on mounds or on the edge of the high bank. Their tenure is complicated by the fact that the river moves and land physically changes sides, which produced a specialised body of customary law recorded in the settlement reports.
Between India and Pakistan the same problem is a border problem. The Sutlej and the Ravi move, and land across the fence but on the Indian side of the line is farmed under army escort at fixed hours.
Some thousands of hectares of Punjab farmland lie between the border fence and the actual border. Farmers cross a gate in the morning and come back before it shuts.
The bet is the land inside the river's flood plain, rich and easily watered, farmed in the dry months and abandoned when the water comes up.
Villages in the bet are built on raised ground or are rebuilt after floods, and the tenure and the revenue treatment of bet land have their own rules going back to the settlements.
Sand mining, embankments and the changed flood regime have altered all of it. The bet is where the 2023 flooding did most of its damage.