That seventy per cent of Punjab's youth are on drugs. No survey has ever found this. The best study, in 2015, estimated about 232,000 opioid dependent people in a state of thirty million. The problem is real and the figure is invented.
That the cancer train proves pesticides cause cancer in the Malwa. The train is real and the epidemiology is contested, and several cancer registry analyses put Punjab near the national average.
That Punjab is a Sikh state. Sikhs are around fifty-eight per cent of Indian Punjab and a small minority in the larger Pakistani Punjab, and the historic province was Muslim-majority.
That Punjabis are all farmers. Punjab is about thirty-seven per cent urban, its largest city runs on small industry, and its most successful export is labour.
That Partition violence was spontaneous communal hatred. The best scholarship describes organised groups, prepared lists and returning demobilised soldiers, and Rawalpindi burned five months before the boundary was published.
That the Green Revolution was an unambiguous success or an unambiguous disaster. It fed India and it is exhausting the aquifer, and both statements are true and neither is the whole thing.
Every one of these is repeated confidently by people who have never checked, including in Punjab.
That Punjab is rich: it was, and its per capita income has fallen relative to other states for thirty years. That Punjab is Sikh: it is about fifty-eight per cent Sikh and about two fifths Hindu.
That Punjabis are all farmers: about a third of the rural population is landless. That the drug problem is a border problem: most of it is a demand problem in the towns.
That the language is safe because there are a hundred and fifty million speakers, and that Punjab means Indian Punjab. Both of those are the assumptions this site is written against.