Emigration takes the young. What is left in a heavily emigrated Punjab village is an older population, a shrinking school roll, and houses maintained by caretakers for owners who visit once every few years.
Punjab's fertility rate is below replacement and has been for some time, and its population growth is among the lowest in India.
The old age pension is small and delayed. Care for the elderly falls on whoever is present, which is often a daughter-in-law or nobody.
Old people living alone while their children are abroad is a recognised category in the Doaba, with its own vocabulary, and there are organisations and police arrangements specifically for them because they are targets for crime.
The village that funds a marble gurdwara from Canada and cannot staff its own school is the same village, and the money and the absence come from the same decision.
This is the demographic consequence of a century of emigration and it has arrived faster than anyone planned for.
A Doaba village with heavy emigration has an age profile like a European one: few people between twenty and forty, and a large number over sixty.
The old stay with a caretaker or alone, and the money comes every month. What does not come is anybody to take them to a hospital.
There is no old age care infrastructure in rural Punjab beyond the pension and the family, and the family is the part that has moved.