The Coke Machine (37 page)

Meanwhile, whatever influence Gandhi’s spirit of nonviolence had on the village activists, they made it clear they would resist the reopening of the plant by any means necessary. Sure enough, in August the protest turned ugly, with police charging a line of protesters and injuring six while arresting seventy. Into the breach stepped the state pollution control board, which declared a few days later that the plant couldn’t reopen because its application was incomplete. The company had not mentioned cadmium in its raw materials, it charged, despite the heavy metal’s presence in the wastewater sludge—therefore it must provide a new application explaining how the chemical was used in the production process.

The announcement was essentially checkmate for the company, which declined to submit a new application. In fact, the plant hasn’t extracted a single liter of water since it closed in March 2004. Even as the activists celebrated the outcome, however, the result was in some small way a victory for the company as well. Faced with the real possibility of violence—even deaths—Coke had everything to lose in forcing a reopening, especially now that the eye of the world had been turned on the situation in India. Now, at least, the company saved face by arguing it was prevented from operating by a capricious state with a known communist past, with which it refused to do business.

As Coke’s former public relations head, Banerjee, says, Coke “would at least win public sympathy from other parts of India, and Kerala would once against be damned as an ‘investors’ graveyard’ by the media and the public.” That refrain was taken up not only by the company, but also by the U.S. government when a new study by CSE found even more pesticides in Coke and Pepsi in 2006 and the Kerala state government, now eager to align itself with the Plachimada movement, banned the sale of Coke and Pepsi in the entire state. (At least six other states pushed through more limited soft-drink bans, prohibiting sales in hospitals and educational institutions.)

“This kind of action is a setback for the Indian economy,” said U.S. undersecretary of international trade, Franklin Lavin, his comment reminiscent of the outcry fifty years earlier when France banned Coke. “In a time when India is working hard to attract and retain foreign investment, it would be unfortunate if the discussion were dominated by those who did not want to treat foreign companies fairly.” The bans were soon struck down by courts on the grounds that state government had no authority to ban imported products.

Even so, the plant closure in Plachimada continued to resonate across India—and the world—showing the power and political pressure that could be mobilized by a determined group of citizens. “Whatever the technical reasons for the closure of the plant, it was really done because of the community resistance,” boasts Ajayan. And that included not only local resistance, but also the international pressure. “So far as their brand image is concerned,” says Bijoy, “the campaign in India didn’t seem to bother them that much. The campaign in the U.S. seemed to worry them.”

Closing one plant, however, didn’t necessarily make it easier to close any more. Coke knew that brand image cut both ways. When Neville Isdell took charge in the summer of 2004, he moved to neutralize the Indian situation as quickly as he had moved to still the controversy around childhood obesity in the United States. Within weeks, he’d flown to India personally to assess the situation, even toying with the idea of spinning off Hindustan Coca-Cola to become a franchise bottler, providing a buffer to insulate the company from criticism. In the end, however, Coca-Cola India took a course more similar to the one taken in the United States than that taken in Colombia: remaking itself from an environmental pariah to an environmental leader.

 

 

 

The village
of Kala Dera is located some twenty-five miles from Jaipur, the capital of the northwestern state of Rajasthan and one of India’s top tourist attractions. Known as the pink city for the rose color of its ancient walls, Jaipur is chock-full of temples and maharaja palaces. The opulence quickly fades, however, on the dusty road out to Kala Dera, a screaming tumult of roadside cafés and brightly colored shops spilling sacks of grain and farming equipment.

Past the commercial areas, green shoots sprout from earth where farmers have planted wheat in advance of the monsoon. Few people are out to tend them, however, on this mid-June day, when it’s 110 degrees and there is little shade to break up the sun’s heat aside from the spiky khejri trees that provide fodder for camels. This is a transitional zone; half of Rajasthan is fed by rivers, the other is arid desert completely dependent on groundwater.

Few areas are less ideal for a water-intensive industry like bottling soft drinks. Then again, the same aridity that makes the land thirsty also parches the throats of the populace. To cut transportation costs to serve the area, Hindustan Coca-Coca built a bottling plant here in 1999 in an industrial park set up by the state government. “Rajasthan is an important market,” says northern India public affairs head Ranjan. “There was market potential—that is the only reason we sited it here.”

Today Ranjan has brought with him a colleague, whom he identifies as a public relations consultant named Sunil Sharma, who is dressed in a dark blue long-sleeve shirt and is as gregarious as Ranjan is taciturn. “I have been on roads all over the world, to Holland, Belgium, Paris,” he says as he pulls into honking traffic on the way from Jaipur. “And I come back to India and the air is stinky, but it’s great. I breathe it in, and it’s a perfect democracy, I think. Anyone can drive anywhere, anyone can do anything.”

He seems to realize what he’s said the moment it’s out of his mouth. After all, it wasn’t long before Coke was accused of doing anything it wanted in Kala Dera—especially depleting the aquifer without regard to community water needs. As in Mehdiganj, Ranjan denies the charge. While here he concedes the water level is dropping, he cites studies showing that industry accounts for less than 1 percent of water use, while farmers use 85 percent. “Having said that,” he adds, “we also need to look at what water users are doing to replenish the water they are taking.”

That is Ranjan’s goal today. Learning from the controversy elsewhere in the country, Coca-Cola India has moved aggressively in the name of corporate social responsibility to actually replace the water they have taken from the desert here. To do that, they use a process developed by local farmers for centuries in India called “rainwater harvesting,” through which the company claims it has recharged seventeen times the amount of water it has extracted in Rajasthan.

Before leaving Jaipur, Ranjan and Sharma drive up to a school where Sharma points out pipes attached to the walls. They funnel rain collected on the rooftop to an open rectangular tank. At one end is a concrete circle a foot or two across filled in with sand and gravel. That’s just the top of the “recharge shaft,” says Sharma, a two-hundred-foot bore well that filters water directly down into the aquifer.

The system can recharge 1.3 million liters of water annually “if the rainfall is average,” says Sharma, meaning 560 millimeters of rain over the four rainy months between June and September. Asked about the actual recharge of the shaft, Ranjan replies that the company hasn’t yet instituted a means for measuring that, though they are working on it. A school official leading the tour says the system has fixed previous problems with water scarcity, even though “we still have a problem in summer.” Sharma immediately corrects him: “No, you have no problems.” Looking a bit flustered, the official clarifies, “In the summer months, we had problems. Now we have no problems.”

While Coca-Cola admits that rainwater harvesting in Jaipur does nothing to recharge the aquifer in Kala Dera, Ranjan says the company has installed some 150 projects within three kilometers of the plant, constructed atop other buildings or positioned in riverbeds to catch runoff. And that’s not all the company has done to help local farmers. In 2005, the company upgraded Kala Dera’s general hospital, its women’s hospital, and even its veterinary hospital. And along the road to the village, it has partnered to create a “farm education center” to teach farmers new “drip irrigation” methods that use 70 percent less water than flood irrigation traditionally used by farmers.

Those corporate social responsibility efforts have earned the company goodwill among at least some in the village, including a farmer with scraggly salt-and-pepper hair and a long white kurta whom Ranjan introduces. The water level has stabilized at around ninety feet below the ground, says the man, who works as a building contractor in addition to growing wheat and spinach on seven acres of land. Those who have protested the plant, he continued, are outsiders from other villages jealous of the improvements Coke has made there. The principal of another school where Coke has instituted rainwater harvesting goes further, saying that the protesters are “day laborers” from another village paid to swell the ranks at protests.

There’s no question in their minds who did the hiring—Amit Srivastava and his local representative, a Jaipur-based activist named Sawai Singh. According to Sharma, Srivastava shows up a day before or a day after the protests, hiring laborers from the neighboring village of Chamu to take part in the demonstrations at 100 rupees ($2) a pop. Local organizers, he says, Srivastava hires for 2,000 rupees ($100) a month.

 

 

 

Srivastava himself
arrives in Kala Dera’s marketplace an hour later, baseball cap covering his eyes, and accompanied by several of those local organizers he’s been accused of hiring for money. When told of Coke’s contention that he’s paying off the village, he laughs. Far from orchestrating a protest movement from eight thousand miles away, Srivastava contends that it’s Coca-Cola India that is manipulating public opinion in the area. “This is a big corporate scam,” he says, “we’ll show you all of it.”

Together, they lead the way to a school just behind the marketplace, quite a different scene from the ones Ranjan and Sharma have shown off. Here, the pipes that run down from the roof are rusting and broken, and in at least one case taped together with packing tape. Behind the school, the concrete basin to collect the water is cracked in several places. No matter the condition of the structures, however, the local head of the resistance, Mahesh Yogi, says that it doesn’t matter since they don’t work without rain. And Rajasthan has experienced intense drought for the past few years, with just three or four annual days of rain at most. Yogi farms two and a half acres of land, he says, but is able to grow crops on only one acre because of a shortage of water. Since his wells dried up, he says he’s had to take a loan of 150,000 rupees ($3,000) for a new 225-foot bore well, taking a second job selling cell phone minutes to support his three small children.

As in other communities, the farmers here accuse Coke of polluting the land as well; since the factory is set within a dense industrial park, however, it’s impossible to prove it. In the industrial park on the edge of town, a haze of foul-smelling smoke hangs over the cluster of factories, while behind them, burning piles of white slag fill a wide trench with a stream running down the middle. “This is not all Coca-Cola,” says Srivastava, “but this is the kind of enforcement you see. This is the unfortunate story of the Third World.” (Ranjan repeats the assertion from Mehdiganj that all solid waste is disposed of at a government-registered facility.) Downstream from the plant, the water itself is obviously polluted, with a green scum floating on top. Passing farmers repeat the same story—if cattle stand in it too long, they get rashes on their legs, and some have even died from drinking it. Whether it’s justified or not, there’s no question whom villagers blame for all of these problems: Coca-Cola. In fact, in direct contradiction of Ranjan and Sharma’s contention that the protesters are hired from outside, a random cross-section of farmers milling around the marketplace mention the company when asked about the water shortages and pollution.

Typical is a farmer named Lakshmi Narayan, who grows groundnut, wheat, and mustard on seven acres of land—but is now able to farm only less than an acre. “Coca-Cola,” he answers simply when asked why he thinks the water level has gone down. “Other factories do use water, but it’s far less than Coke.” As a crowd gathers around him, several other farmers all agree that Coca-Cola is to blame for their distress. Asked how many of them have taken part in protests against the company, every one of them raises a hand.

The extent to which the company is downplaying opposition becomes even clearer after driving a few miles out of town to the home of Rameshwar Prasad Kuri, a prosperous farmer everyone calls by the honorific “Kuriji.” Today happens to be the day before the wedding of one of his sons, and his well-kept house is full of men and small children running underfoot. Kuriji’s family has owned this farm for five generations; when he was a young man, however, he left to enter the civil service, eventually becoming assistant director of the state agricultural department.

With a civil servant’s meticulous love for detail, he has kept track of the water level in his well, which he says was twenty-five to thirty feet below the surface when he retired in 2002. After Coke opened its bottling plant three kilometers away, however, he says the water level has gone down eight to ten feet a year. As in the other villages, Kuriji’s open well is dry, and he has had to buy a more powerful motor to get any water out of his bore well. As a result, he is able to irrigate only half of his seventeen acres. The loss of income has forced his family to take their children out of private school and put off buying a car to make the seven-kilometer trip to market. “The only positive effect is that I don’t smoke anymore,” he laughs. “I don’t even drink tea because we can’t afford it.”

Kuriji’s face is a relief map as expressive as any desert landscape, set with small watchful eyes. He sits cross-legged on a cot wearing a white kurta and gray slacks, periodically letting forth unself-conscious burps that perfume the air slightly with curry. One of the first farmers in the area to organize against the company, Kuriji took the lead from the successful protests in Kerala and Mehdiganj, and he helped organize protests here in 2004, leading marches and rallies around the plant. “Coca-Cola is snatching away our livelihoods,” he says, shaking his head. “We invite Coca-Cola as a guest, and they pick our pockets.”