NEW DELHI: Beverage giant Coca Cola’s cup of woe never runs dry in India. The company has picked up yet another row with local populations over groundwater mining, this time in the largely desert state of western Rajasthan. For several months now villagers around Kaladera, an industrial area outside Jaipur, Rajasthan’s capital, have been demanding the closure of the Coca Cola plant there accusing it of using powerful bore wells to extract vast quantities of water from deep aquifers, depriving them of their share and disturbing the sensitive ecology of the area.

Led by prominent social organisations such as the Jan Sangharsh Samiti (People’s Agitation Forum), the Arya Samaj (a spiritual renewal society) and the Rajasthan Samagra Seva Sangh (a social service group), the villagers intensified their call for a shutdown of the plant from the beginning of June.

Coca Cola set up its bottling plant in Kaladera to manufacture a variety of internationally known soft drink and mineral water brands because of supposedly abundant water resources in the area. But three years of successive droughts have forced the company to reassess its production targets.

Farmers in the region, seriously stressed by the droughts and on the verge of complete ruination, have naturally been incensed by the sight of truckloads of bottled water and beverages rolling out of the factory. Coca Cola, however, has consistently denied that it was excessively extracting water at Kaladera.

But villagers and the voluntary organisations demand that the plant be held accountable for its actions and are staging frequent noisy demonstrations in front of the factory gates.

In a bid to thwart the demonstrations, Coca Cola’s Vice-President Sunil Gupta said the company has been working with Rajasthan’s leading water rights activist Rajendra Singh to set up water harvesting projects in the state aimed at replenishing the groundwater.

But Singh, who heads the well-known voluntary organisation Tarun Bharat Sangh and won the Magsaysay award in 2001 for his water conservation efforts said he supported all efforts at rainwater harvesting but was against people buying bottled drinking water. Singh told IPS that he has, in over two years of campaigning, collected close to four million pledges from people not to buy bottled water and thereby “assert their natural right to water and not buy it as a commodity that can be expropriated by greedy multi-nationals.”

Furthermore, the results of a preliminary probe into the allegations against the Coca Cola unit at Kaladera conducted by the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) seem to indicate that the company’s water-mining activities may in fact have contributed to a lowering of the water table to about 125 feet or 38.1 metres over the past decade. This, according to CGWB, is causing most wells in the area to go dry.

According to estimates made by the CGWB, the plant was extracting water at an average rate of 20,000 cubic metres a month using powerful pumps that reached down into deep- water aquifers through large bore wells within its premises.

“The continuous extraction will lead to deterioration in the quality of ground water by disturbing the natural concentration of earthen salts at various levels in the aquifers,” a hydro-geologist at the CWGB was quoted as telling ‘The Hindu’ daily. —Dawn/Inter-Press Service