In 2005, a Coca-Cola plant in Kerala lost its ability to operate from a local government body. Over a thousand villagers demanded the closure of a plant in Rajasthan last December. And in Mehdiganj, near Varanasi, 500 people demanded the same in February. For the last three years, communities all around India have reacted against water shortages and the contamination of water they claim is being done by Coca-Cola bottling plants.

“The communities have actually started to organize,” said Amit Srivastava of
the India Resource Center, a non-profit group based in California.

According to the IRC, Coca-Cola has 52 plants in India, 25 of which are company-owned. And all around the country, communities living around these plants experience water shortages. Then, said Srivastava, when these communities dig deeper into the land and do, eventually find water, it has been proven that is contaminated.

In the rural parts of India, Srivastava said, farmers and villagers still depend largely on the availability and cleanliness of natural ground water and do not have access to pipe water. In a U.N. World Water Development Report’s rankings of 180 countries in terms of the availability of water, India, one the world’s largest countries, is ranked 133rd. In addition, Coca-Cola has a long and sordid environmental history in the subcontinent.

In 2003, the British Broadcasting Corporation revealed that some Coca-Cola bottling plants in India distributed fertilizer containing waste product from the plants and toxic chemicals such as cadmium to local farmers. In 2004, the Center for Science and Environment presented the Indian government with a study finding that Indian Coca-Cola products contained much higher levels of pesticides than products sold in Europe and the United States.

In addition to protesting against these plants, some local governments are challenging the company in the nation’s courts.

In the southern state of Kerala, after many villagers complained of water shortages near a bottling plant in Plachimada, the Panchayat—or village council—legally challenged the company’s right to extract water. “Within two years of the establishment of the Coca-Cola plant, the people around the plant began experiencing problems that they never ever encountered before,” activist C.R. Bijoy wrote about the situation in Kerala. “Salinity and hardness of water increased with high concentrations of calcium and magnesium that rendered water unfit for human consumption, domestic use (bathing and washing), and for irrigation.”

The state’s court ruled in favor of Coca-Cola and the Panchayat is appealing to India’s Supreme Court. In addition, the plant has remained closed since the Kerala Pollution Control Board disabled the company’s ability to operate in the region in August 2005. The company is appealing the decision.

“We continue to believe that there is no scientific evidence linking scarcity of groundwater and our operations in Kerala,” company spokesperson Kari Bjorhus said.

Activists in Kerala now believe even though the plant remains closed, the case pending in the Supreme Court will decided which party actually has the right to this water. Sunita Narain, director of the Center for Science and Environment, told Indian reporters in 2004 she believed the organic effort against Coca-Cola in Kerala was a model of resistance. And according to the IRC, the Panchayat in Mehdiganj revoked its license of a bottling plant there, in similar fashion to what happened in Kerala, but the plant remains open. And in the Madras area, a village council is trying to use its muscle to stop a plant from opening there.

In regards to the latter example, both the IRC and a news website in the state of Tamilnadu say that one of the main village council members opposing plans to build a Coca-Cola bottling plant there, V. Kamsan, died last August. The IRC said it was under suspicious circumstances and that Kamsan’s widow claims days before he died he was coerced by Coca-Cola officials to change his public officials by forcing him to drink alcohol even though he had fallen ill.

The IRC said that because of Kamsan’s mysterious death, the Coca-Cola’s operation in India is the subject of law enforcement inquiry last February.

“Coca-Cola is not a party to these proceedings and no notices have been issued against it, or any of its partners,” reads a company statement. “The Company views these allegations with the utmost seriousness and will assist in all investigations in any way possible.”

There are other incidents where the company has taken actions that silence opposition to its practices in India. In the summer of 2005, for example, when Indian photographer Sharad Haksar used the Coca-Cola logo in a billboard protesting against the water shortages, the company promptly sued him for copyright infringement.

Company spokespeople maintain that there is no direct link between the operations of their bottling plants and any water shortages in the areas surrounding them. Coca-Cola argues that the entire beverage industry in India uses very little water, and that the drought in Kerala is a result of low rainfall. It also maintains that it is using sustainable means to harvest water. Most notably, company plants collect rainwater for industrial use.

The company rebuts the claims about environmental damage by insisting that it invests heavily in India and that its plants employ thousands of locals. The company boasts about its partnerships with environmental and development groups, including its recent partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to improve water availability in underdeveloped countries.

Speaking to an audience in Varanasi, Robert O. Blake, Jr., U.S. Embassy Charge d’ Affaires, said that the presence of companies like Coca-Cola was necessary for bilateral trade between the two countries and that such a presence would be a benefit to India.

“Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola have both set up plants across the state that create jobs and new markets for local agricultural products such as sugar,” he said. “The United States has long advocated a new, better deal for Indian farmers and consumers.”

But for Srivastava and other activists, the evidence is clear. The communities around the Coca-Cola plants all have the same symptoms. People living in communities around plants cannot afford Coca-Cola products, he said, so one way to put pressure on Coca-Cola is to affect it in its larger markets. The IRC is working with groups like the Coalition to Stop Killer Coke in New York and activists working at campuses in the United States and Europe who are boycotting the beverage company since eight labor leaders have been murdered a bottling plants in Colombia.

Several universities have, at least temporarily, suspended contracts with Coca-Cola because it has not agreed to have an independent investigation into his operations in Colombia and India. Most recently, the University of Michigan and New York University suspended their contracts.

“When the trial happened at the University of Michigan both the Colombia
and Indian accusations came up,” said Ashwini Hardikar of the Coke Coalition at the University of Michigan, speaking on the dispute resolution board’s hearing concerning the contract with Coca-Cola. “They thought the accusations in India were very compelling.”

Srivastava believes that the organizing among village councils in India is the most important thing. If the Supreme Court of India rules in favor of the village council of Kerala, it will be a big victory not just for those in India having to live the environmental impact of Coca-Cola bottling plants. He believes it will set an important precedent in the global economy.

“It is about asserting the right of communities to live free of corporate exploitation,” he said.