The Indo-Gangetic plain is one of the more light-polluted regions in the world and Punjab is fully inside it. There is nowhere in the state where the Milky Way is reliably visible.
Fifty years ago it was visible from every village, and the older agricultural and religious calendars depend on the moon and on the position of stars that most Punjabis have never seen.
The sangrand, the desi months, the eclipse fairs at Kurukshetra and the timing of festivals are all astronomical, and the sky they refer to is no longer legible from the ground.
Winter fog compounds it for several weeks a year.
The Shivalik foothills and the desert edge in Fazilka are the darkest ground left in the state and neither is dark by any international standard.
It is a small loss beside the others on this site and it is total, and it happened in one generation without anyone deciding on it.
The plain has almost no dark sky left. Light from Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Amritsar and Chandigarh, and from the floodlights along the fence, covers most of the state.
The border lighting is a continuous line of high mast lamps running hundreds of kilometres and it is visible from orbit as a bright thread across the plain.
The Kandi and the Shivalik edge hold the darkest sky in Punjab. There is no observatory, no dark sky reserve and no organised amateur astronomy of any size in the state.