After eleven years of campaigning by local people suffering from water
shortages, state authorities have closed Coca-Cola's bottling plant at
Mehdiganj, Uttar Pradesh as a result of people’s movement against land grab,
illegal construction and indiscriminate withdrawal of water. It is to be known whether Coca-Cola is doing
such things in India. But the closure has triggered international debate on the
water policy of Coca-Cola and the extent of its implementation in India. "Coca-Cola's thirst
for profits in India have placed its business interests over the well-being of
communities and the environment and this is not acceptable as the community of
Mehdiganj has shown", said Amit
Srivastava of the international campaigning group, India Resource Center.
What are the reasons
behind closure of Coca-Cola plant?
In Mehdiganj near Varanasi in Uttarpradesh is mainly an agriculture belt.
In 2003 Coca-Cola started its bottling plant with a temporary permit for
operation with a production target of 20000 cases per day. By 2009 it has
increased ts production to 36000 crates per day without any permit from the
authority. Neither had they sought for any groundwater clearance from the CGWA.
1999 Mehdiganj was a safe category block as was assessed by the Central
Groundwater Authority. But by 2004 it turned into a critical block in terms of
groundwater resource. The third reason
is that it had built some constructions on community land which belongs to the
Gramsabha. In December 2013, local authorities passed an order to evict Coca-Cola from the illegally occupied land. This
followed a ruling by the The Supreme Court of India of 28th January 2011, which
stated that any structures built on illegal land would have to be demolished.
Coca-Cola and zero water policy
Coca-Cola advocates for its zero water policy
which means that the company will return to the Earth the water they are
withdrawing. Coca-Cola has his own
water policies and strictly adheres to some activities that include source
water surveillance, groundwater recharge in the catchment, and ensure
sustainability. It is important for water users to know that there is need to
allocate financial resources for the management of the same resources. The Coca
cola plant should have used money to help in the recharging of the aquifers
where they were getting their ground water. The principle of use money to
generate should have been applied. Also there was need to have a dual purpose
borehole where by some water from another source may be by using rainwater
harvesting should been directed into the borehole while at the same time it is
being pumped. There should have been a case where there are time when pumping
is less than recharging. There should have also been ground water monitoring so
as to evaluate the dynamics of the water table for the said aquifer. It is a
demonstration that big corporates like Coca Cola have to look beyond their own
practices and get engaged with broader catchment level resource management. No
matter what their own practices are, or the terms of their legal licence, they
will lose their social licence to operate if resources become
depleted. This is a very interesting story indeed, showing the need for
multi-nationals like Coca Cola to increase their focus on the creation of
shared or societal value rather than shareholder value. Certainly, producers of
goods that are generally perceived as unhealthy and 'superfluous' will
increasingly be confronted with the question of how ethical it is that they
make use of scarce resources.
Doesn't Coca-Cola adhere to the best practices
in natural resource management in the developed part of the world? Then why they
have given a miss in India?
Whether Coca-Cola had
adhered to best practices or not is immaterial. No catchment has infinite
resource. Artificial recharge is something like allocating surface runoff into
groundwater storage. But total water resource of a watershed remains the same.
Groundwater recharge always depletes environmental flow or other natural
allocation of water. What Coca-Cola or other beverage factories do is export of
water from the catchment (watershed) to the outside market. This consequently
depletes the total water resource of the catchment.
If large companies that depend on scarce resources want to keep their 'license to operate', they need to consider what they can do to help reduce overall resource scarcity, beyond their own product chain or sector. Reducing its own ecological footprint is no longer enough; industry needs to also help competing users of scarce resources to become more efficient - especially when operating in poor communities where little funding is available for investments in e.g improved irrigation systems.
The company is also the target of a major community campaign in Kala Dera in Rajasthan where the community is seeking closure of the bottling plant due to rapidly depleting ground water.
Most recently, Coca-Cola's plans to build
a new factory in Charba in
Uttarakhand were defeated almost
as soon as the proposal was made public in 2013, testament to how quickly and
efficiently communities can organize and network in India against problematic
companies such as Coca-Cola.
Amit Srivastava promised: "We will ensure that
Coca-Cola will face heightened scrutiny anywhere it plans to operate in India
because the track record of the company is dismal."
