A baoli is a stepped well: a shaft with a flight of steps down to the water, so that the water can be reached on foot at any level as the table rises and falls.
Guru Amar Das Ji had the baoli at Goindwal dug with eighty-four steps, and made it a place of assembly. It is the earliest Sikh pilgrimage site and it was built as public infrastructure, not as a shrine.
Baoli Sahib at Goindwal, the baoli at Dera Baba Nanak, and others at Lahore and across the province were built by Sikh, Mughal and Rajput patrons alike. They are cool, they hold water through the dry season, and they served as rest stops.
Almost all are dry. The water table has fallen far below the deepest step in most of Punjab, which means the structures now function only as architecture.
A stepped well that no longer reaches water is a measurable record of how far the table has dropped since it was built. Nobody has used them that way.
The eighty-four steps are read in the tradition against the eighty-four lakh forms of existence, so that a descent to the water is also a count. Whether the number was chosen for that or read into it afterward is not settled.
Goindwal sat on the road between Lahore and Delhi and the water was the reason travellers stopped. The town was founded around the crossing and the well, which is how the third Guru's centre came to be where it is.
Others survive at Lahore, at Sirhind, at Bassi Pathana and in a number of villages, mostly silted, mostly unprotected, and almost all of them dry.