December 19, 2003	Friday	Shawwal 24, 1424

NEW DELHI: Green groups are jubilant over a potentially far-reaching court ruling this week, which said that the transnational beverage giant Coca-Cola may own the land on which one of its plants in southern Kerala state is sited — but not the water it holds.

The Kerala High Court ruled on Tuesday that the groundwater resources below Coca-Cola’s bottling plant at Plachimada village, home to tribal people, was in fact “property held in trust”.

It directed the company find alternate sources of water for its plant within a month.

“This is an important ruling and may have a bearing on similar large-scale extraction and misuse of groundwater resources by industrial units in other parts of the country,” Gopal Krishna, coordinator for Toxic Links, a well-known non-government organisation (NGO), told IPS.

But local groups were not satisfied with the court’s ruling, against which Coca-Cola said it would be filing an appeal.

Said C.R Bijoy, who leads the National Front for Tribal Self- rule (NFTS): “The whole issue is reduced to how much water the Coke plant can extract from the ground right below the plant in order to ensure that the factory continues in operation.”

Bijoy and the NFTS have been agitating, sometimes violently, for the closure of the Coca-Cola plant and compensation for local residents. They also want the restoration of the environment in and around the 16-hectare plot to the original state before bottling operations began in 2000.

“The issue is about criminal liability, ecological accountability and the impact of the plant on health, economy, employment and agriculture,” Bijoy said.

One way or another, the court ruling has charged up the atmosphere for the World Water Conference that is being held at Plachimada — it is being seen as an Indian version of Cochabamba in Brazil, where local people struggled and succeeded in thwarting the commodification of their water resources.

For 605 days now, more than 1,000 households of tribal and ‘dalit’ (untouchable caste) people have been in agitating in front of the Coca-Cola plant’s premises, demanding compensation for depleting water resources and environmental degradation that they say has been caused by the company.

“This has a historic parallel to the Cochabamba water stir,” said M.P Veerendrakumar, chief of ‘Mathrubhumi’, the popular Malayalam- language daily newspaper, current president of the Indian Newspaper Society and one of the main organisers of the three-day conference that starts on Jan 21.

According to Veerendrakumar, the Plachimada conference, timed to follow the World Social Forum in Mumbai from Jan 16-21, would discuss issues related to water management such as the plan to link up India’s major rivers.

“This conference will redefine the poor people’s fight for water for survival in India and in the world,” said Vandana Shiva, the internationally known activist for sustainable development and leader of the People’s World Water Forum (PWWF). This was formed to counter the agenda of the World Water Forum (WWF).

Shiva charged the WWF with being “a brainchild of the World Water Council (WWC), a policy think tank run by the World Bank, IMF and regional banks such as the Asian Development Bank (AsDB) as well as the major water corporations, such as Vivendi, Suez and Bechtel”.

“Water is a human right and corporations have no business profiting from peoples’ need for water,” said Shiva, adding that governments are failing in their responsibilities to their citizens and nature by allowing the commodification of water.

According to Greenpeace, which is supporting the Plachimada agitation, the Coca-Cola plant is extracting more than 1.5 million litres of water everyday through a number of tubewells installed within its premises.

“Coca-Cola is drawing this water for free and making millions of dollars by converting it into softdrinks without paying anything to the villagers,” said Greenpeace activist Ameer Shahul.

Coca-Cola vice president Sunil Gupta has said that the plant extracts only 300,000 litres of water per day and that it had permission from the government to use up to half a million litres.

But Tuesday’s court order said the government had no right to allow a private company to extract large amounts of water out of the ground because this would encourage other landowners to mine water, resulting in the drying up of groundwater resources.

According to A Krishnan, president of the Perumatty ‘panchayat’ (elected village local body) on which the plant stands, it is difficult to verify the exact amount of water that is extracted by Coca-Cola.

But “we will not allow Coca-Cola to get away with this,” said Krishnan, who is busy sending out invitations for the water conference to people around the world on behalf of the Perumatty ‘panchayat’. —Dawn/The InterPress News Service.