Part 9 (1/2)

An increasingly militant movement in both Plachimada and Mehdiganj began using more direct tactics to put pressure on c.o.ke. Word of the BBC report about c.o.ke's toxic sludge gave new fire to the community in Mehdiganj, which demanded its local pollution control board carry out tests. But Uttar Pradesh (UP), the state in which Varanasi is located, is not Kerala. Both culturally and politically, the state is strictly ordered along caste lines, with the Shudra and Dalit castes populating the rural villages strictly separated from the Brahmin and Kshatriya castes populating finance and industry. It also has a reputation for being one of the more corrupt states in the country. In 2009, a few months before the Lok Samiti graduation ceremony, police arrested the regional head of the state pollution control board in Varanasi-the person responsible for overseeing the Mehdiganj c.o.ke plant. They charged him with taking a bribe from another business in exchange for a ”no objection” certificate allowing it to operate. militant movement in both Plachimada and Mehdiganj began using more direct tactics to put pressure on c.o.ke. Word of the BBC report about c.o.ke's toxic sludge gave new fire to the community in Mehdiganj, which demanded its local pollution control board carry out tests. But Uttar Pradesh (UP), the state in which Varanasi is located, is not Kerala. Both culturally and politically, the state is strictly ordered along caste lines, with the Shudra and Dalit castes populating the rural villages strictly separated from the Brahmin and Kshatriya castes populating finance and industry. It also has a reputation for being one of the more corrupt states in the country. In 2009, a few months before the Lok Samiti graduation ceremony, police arrested the regional head of the state pollution control board in Varanasi-the person responsible for overseeing the Mehdiganj c.o.ke plant. They charged him with taking a bribe from another business in exchange for a ”no objection” certificate allowing it to operate.

Years earlier, however, the pollution control board not only declined to test c.o.ke's sludge, but also denied c.o.ke was even distributing it to farmers. ”The pollution control board said, 'We have visited the village and they are not doing this,' ” says Nandlal. ” 'If you have seen this, show it to us.'” Exasperated, he and his fellow activists appeared at the board's offices one day with a sack full of sludge and dumped it on the desk of the clerk: ”We kind of took him hostage.” Several dozen protesters blocked the main entrance until officials agreed to investigate.

By this time, the establishments in Mehdiganj and Plachimada weren't the only bottling plants facing controversy. A study by the state pollution board in West Bengal found toxic levels of cadmium in the effluent of three plants around Kolkata. And in 2003, the Central Pollution Control Board conducted tests of sludge from sixteen c.o.ke and Pepsi plants-and found eight c.o.ke plants to have excessive levels of lead and cadmium. And it added a third toxin: chromium, a heavy metal that causes skin rashes and dermat.i.tis on contact and is a suspected carcinogen with repeated ingestion. The agency henceforth ordered Coca-Cola to treat its waste as hazardous, requiring disposal in specially lined concrete landfills.

More recently, the nonprofit Hazards Centre has continued to confirm the presence of toxic heavy metals around c.o.ke plants. Located on Delhi's southern fringes in a cramped concrete apartment building, the office is a buzzing hive of young researchers sitting around computers. In the middle sits director Dunu Roy, sporting a white ponytail and balding slightly on top.

Roy's group first did an a.s.sessment of Plachimada's groundwater back in 2006; since then it has done a.s.sessments of water conditions at five other c.o.ke plants around India, publis.h.i.+ng a report in 2010. In each location, the scientists measured the presence of lead, cadmium, and chromium in both the groundwater and the effluent coming directly out of the plant. All five plants contained chromium, some in levels of up to eleven times government limits. In addition, cadmium was found at two plants, including Mehdiganj, and lead at one. In summary, says Roy, ”two things are incontrovertible.” One: that the water draining directly out of the plant contains heavy metals. And two: that contamination in the groundwater decreases as one gets farther away from the plants.

So what about the wastewater treatment plant that Ranjan so proudly showed off at the Mehdiganj plant? Roy takes one look at the data showing limits on pH, dissolved solids, and oxygen demand, and immediately says that c.o.ke is tracking the wrong numbers. That data, he says, will tell you only if the water is potable, not that it is free from chemical contamination. None of the aeration or filtering that Hindustan c.o.ke does will remove heavy metals, he says, which need to be percolated out using salts. Not only is that process expensive, but then you are left with hazardous solid waste that needs to be disposed of. The bioa.s.say with the two fish, he adds, is completely laughable, completely failing the scientific protocol for such a test. ”To do this bioa.s.say, you need to have six tanks with different concentrations in the water, with twenty fish in each tank,” he says. ”So you'd need 120 fish in all.”

Increasingly armed with countrywide data, the various campaigns against Coca-Cola began coordinating their activities. Ajayan and Nandlal met for the first time in January 2004, along with Srivastava and other international activists, at the World Social Forum, an annual progressive strategy session-c.u.m-spring break for lefties that coincides with the meeting of the world's political and financial masters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Held in Mumbai, the forum featured a march of some five hundred people to protest c.o.ke, led by Indian environmentalist Medha Patkar; SINALTRAINAL president Javier Correa was marching right alongside. with countrywide data, the various campaigns against Coca-Cola began coordinating their activities. Ajayan and Nandlal met for the first time in January 2004, along with Srivastava and other international activists, at the World Social Forum, an annual progressive strategy session-c.u.m-spring break for lefties that coincides with the meeting of the world's political and financial masters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Held in Mumbai, the forum featured a march of some five hundred people to protest c.o.ke, led by Indian environmentalist Medha Patkar; SINALTRAINAL president Javier Correa was marching right alongside.

Immediately afterward, several dozen environmental activists came to Plachimada for a somewhat grandiosely named World Water Conference, a three-day who's who of lefties, including Canadian water activists Tony Clarke and Maude Barlow, French antiglobalist farmer Jose Bove, and Bolivian peasant leader Oscar Olivera, who had organized a successful peasant movement against water privatization by Bechtel in Cochabamba. There the activists struck a militant tone, calling on c.o.ke to ”Quit India”-the same slogan Gandhi used in his long fight against British occupation.

Nandlal and his fellow activists evoked Gandhi's spirit more confrontationally in Mehdiganj, where they began a hunger strike in front of the plant in January 2004. c.o.ke obtained a restraining order prohibiting protests within three hundred meters (despite the fact that some of the protesters actually lived lived within that radius), which was violated in late 2004 with a ten-day march of some one thousand villagers, some carrying ”Quit India” signs in a direct evocation of Gandhi's March to the Sea. within that radius), which was violated in late 2004 with a ten-day march of some one thousand villagers, some carrying ”Quit India” signs in a direct evocation of Gandhi's March to the Sea.

By the time they arrived at the plant in Mehdiganj, a cordon of police was waiting, blocking the entrance. In a group, the villagers surged past the three-hundred-meter line, as police began striking them with batons. Even as the protesters dropped to the ground in pain, heads and arms bleeding, they say, they held to a vow of nonviolence (with one well-marked apparent exception of an elderly woman who took off her slipper and began hitting a policeman with it).

In all, says Nandlal, police arrested more than 350 people, including more than forty women. He himself spent fifteen days in jail, shaken by the violence-especially seeing police beating women from his village. ”It was really painful,” he says. ”I thought about giving up. But the community had not given up.” In fact, it was the women who pushed to continue the protests. ”Women are most in need of water,” says Vishwakarma, ”to clean, cook, bathe-their whole lives are dependent on water. Men have a limit, but when women are angry, they will never stop.” A few weeks after the violence, some five hundred marchers wearing black ribbons over their mouths marched up to the three-hundred-meter line, standing silently in protest. A year later, in 2005, police stood aside as eight hundred people marched right up to the gates.

At the same time, the battle lines had been drawn more metaphorically in Kerala, now with the state's opposition political parties and the village council on one side, and the state government and Coca-Cola on the other. When the case to decide c.o.ke's fate finally went to court, Kerala's high court returned two conflicting decisions-first declaring in December 2003 that the company's groundwater extraction was ”illegal” and the panchayat panchayat was justified in canceling the license; and then on appeal, saying the council had acted without sufficient information, and needed to do a groundwater study first. was justified in canceling the license; and then on appeal, saying the council had acted without sufficient information, and needed to do a groundwater study first.

In light of a crippling drought that year, however, the state's chief minister declared in February 2004 the plant would be banned from extracting groundwater until the government's study was completed. The pickets at the hut went on for another year as the two sides waited for the results, which eventually came as a victory for c.o.ke in February 2005, ruling that the company could extract up to half a million liters a day without affecting groundwater.

Asked about the ruling, the former village council president Krishnan discounts the study, contending that the company must have bribed the government officials who conducted it. ”The thing is very simple, because they tried to bribe me,” he says impatiently, contending that he was approached by c.o.ke officials offering money for ”community or personal development.” While Krishnan declines to say how much, another source says the offer was as high as $200,000-a small fortune in India.

Still defiant, the panchayat panchayat appeared to follow the court order to renew the license in June 2005-but only if the company would agree to certain conditions, among them that c.o.ke ”divulge all of its ingredients.” In other words, the appeared to follow the court order to renew the license in June 2005-but only if the company would agree to certain conditions, among them that c.o.ke ”divulge all of its ingredients.” In other words, the panchayat panchayat of a tiny village in southern India was asking c.o.ke to provide it with the vaunted secret formula that the company had guarded for decades in an Atlanta safe-deposit box-a formula that the company had refused to give up years earlier in favor of leaving the entire country. The village council must have known that c.o.ke would never comply. of a tiny village in southern India was asking c.o.ke to provide it with the vaunted secret formula that the company had guarded for decades in an Atlanta safe-deposit box-a formula that the company had refused to give up years earlier in favor of leaving the entire country. The village council must have known that c.o.ke would never comply.

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-c.o.ke 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 c.o.ke's former public relations head, Banerjee, says, c.o.ke ”would at least win public sympathy from other parts of India, and Kerala would once against be d.a.m.ned 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 c.o.ke and Pepsi in 2006 and the Kerala state government, now eager to align itself with the Plachimada movement, banned the sale of c.o.ke and Pepsi in the entire state. (At least six other states pushed through more limited soft-drink bans, prohibiting sales in hospitals and educational inst.i.tutions.) ”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 c.o.ke. ”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. c.o.ke 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 a.s.sess 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 cafes and brightly colored shops spilling sacks of grain and farming equipment. 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 cafes 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 c.o.ke 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 inst.i.tuted 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 fl.u.s.tered, 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 c.o.ke has made there. The princ.i.p.al of another school where c.o.ke has inst.i.tuted 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 c.o.ke'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.” 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 c.o.ke'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 c.o.ke 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 a.s.sertion 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 sc.u.m floating on top. Pa.s.sing 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 c.o.ke.” 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 a.s.sistant 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 c.o.ke 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 s.n.a.t.c.hing away our livelihoods,” he says, shaking his head. ”We invite Coca-Cola as a guest, and they pick our pockets.”

When told of Sharma's contention that the group hires day laborers to swell its numbers, Kuriji's face crinkles with laughter. ”Who has that kind of money?” he asks, incredulous. Ever the civil servant, he pulls out a photo alb.u.m full of pictures of protests. ”Do these look like hundred-rupees-a-day day laborers?” he asks, pointing to the faces of men much like those around his home for the wedding, simply dressed but not poor. Next, he opens a ledger book in which he's written captions for each photo with name after name of partic.i.p.ants, some with signatures beside them. ”This is ample proof they are not day laborers,” he concludes.

Even so, the movement here has struggled to achieve the critical ma.s.s seen in Plachimada, or even Mehdiganj. The largest protest was in May 2004, when, a news report says, some two thousand people came to see Indian environmentalist Medha Patkar and local Gandhian social activist Sawai Singh. As in Kerala, Singh has helped bring a pet.i.tion against the company, arguing that local people had the right to groundwater before a multinational corporation, but it was denied by the local court. Recently, however, Rajasthan has seen a change of government from the more conservative Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to the socialist-leaning Congress party, giving the community members hope that the issue will be revisited. ”We are not ready for defeat,” says Kuriji. ”We will carry on this agitation and c.o.ke will get tired. We will certainly shut down the plant.”