Message in a Bottle
How Coca-Cola Gave Back to Plachimada
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Plachimada, Kerala.
Whizzing along the road in the little Tata Indica, driven prestissimo by
Sudhi, we crossed the state line from Tamil Nadu into Kerala, branched
off the main road and ended up in the settlement of Plachimada, mostly
inhabited by extremely poor people. There on one side of the street was
the Coca-Cola plant, among the largest in Asia, and on the other a shack
filled with locals eager to impart the news that they were now, as of
April 2, in Day 1076 of their struggle against the plant.
Coca-Cola came to India in 1993, looking for water and markets in a
country where one third of all villages are without anything approaching
adequate water and shortages are growing every day. Indeed India is
facing a gigantic water crisis, even as Coca Cola and other companies
haul free water to the cities from the countryside and water parks and
golf courses metastasize around cities like Mumbai.
The bloom was on neoliberalism back then when Coca-Cola came in, with
central and state authorities falling over themselves to lease, sell or
simply hand over India's national assets in the name of economic
"reform". They still are, but the popular mood has changed.
The apex posterboy of neo-liberalism, Chandrababu Naidu of Andhra
Pradesh, feted by Bill Clinton, John Wolfenson and Bill Gates and such
nabobs of nonsense as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, was tossed
out in elections a year ago. Naidu's fans in the west and indeed in
India's elites, were thunderstruck. The reason was simple. Below the top
tier, hundreds of millions of Indians went to the polls last year to
register a furious No. There are hundreds of parables to explain this.
Here's one, courtesy of Coca-Cola.
Across India's give-away decade Coca-Cola took over some 22 Indian
bottling companies, capturing their marketing and distribution systems
and easily beating back various legal assaults for predatory practices
to eliminate competition. Senior civil servants and politicians, some of
them pocketing covert subventions, made tremulous speeches about the New
India. Meanwhile out in the real world of the Indian countryside,
Coca-Cola's bottling plants were getting less enthusiastic reviews.
Coca-Cola had sound reasons in zoning in on Plachimada. A rain-shadow
region in the heart of Kerala's water belt, it has large underground
water deposits. The site Coca-Cola picked was set between two large
reservoirs and ten meters south of an irrigation canal. The ground water
reserves had apparently showed up on satellite surveys done by the
company's prospectors. The Coke site is surrounded by colonies where
several hundred poor people live in crowded conditions, with an average
holding of four-tenths of an acre. Virtually the sole source of
employment is wage labor, usually for no more than 100 to 120 days in
the year.
Ushered in by Kerala's present "reform"-minded government, the plant
duly got a license from the local council, known as the Perumatty Grama
panchayat. Under India's constitution the panchayats have total
discretion in such matters. Coca-Cola bought a property of some 40 acres
held by a couple of large landowners, built a plant, sank six bore
wells, and commenced operations.
Within six months the villagers saw the level of their water drop
sharply, even run dry. The water they did draw was awful. It gave some
people diarrhea and bouts of dizziness. To wash in it was to get skin
rashes,a burning feel on the skin. It left their hair greasy and sticky.
The women found that rice and dal did not get cooked but became hard. A
thousand families have been directly affected, and well water affected
up to a three or four kilometers from the plant.
The locals, mostly indigenous adivasis and dalits had never had much,
after allocation of a bit of land from the true, earth-shaking reforms
of Kerala's Communist government, democratically elected in 1956. And
they had had plenty of good water. On April 22, 2002 the locals
commenced peaceful agitation and shut the plant down. Responding to
popular pressure, the panchayat rescinded its license to Coca-Cola on
August 7,2003. Four days later the local Medical Officer ruled that
water in wells near the plant was unfit for human use, a judgement
reached by various testing labs months earlier.
All of this was amiably conveyed to us in brisk and vivid detail by the
villagers. Then Mylamma, an impressively eloquent woman, led us down a
path to one of the local village wells nearby. It was a soundly built
square well, some 10 feet from side to side. About five feet from the
top we could see the old water line, but no water. Peering twenty feet
further down in the semi-darkness we could see a stagnant glint.
Today, in a region known as the rice bowl of Kerala, women in Plachimada
have to walk a 4-kilometer round trip to get drinkable water, toting the
big vessels on hip or their head. Even better-off folk face ruin. One
man said he'd been farming eight acres of rice paddy, hiring 20 workers,
but now, with no water for the paddy, he survives on the charity of his
son-in-law.
The old village wells had formerly gone down to 150 to 200 feet. The
company's bore wells go down to 750 to 1000 feet. As the water table
dropped, all manner of toxic matter began to rise too, leaching up to
higher levels as the soil dried out.
The whole process would play well on The Simpsons. It has a ghastly
comicality to it. When the plant was running at full tilt 85 truck loads
rolled out of the plant gates, each load consisting of 550 to 600 cases,
24 bottles to the case, all containing Plachimada's prime asset, water,
now enhanced in cash value by Cola's infusions of its syrups.
Also trundling through the gates came 36 lorries a day, each with six
50-gallon drums of sludge from the plant's filtering and bottle cleaning
processes, said sludge resembling buff-colored puke in its visual
aspect, a white-to-yellow granular sauce blended with a darker garnish
of blended fabric, insulating material and other fibrous matter, plus a
sulphuric acid smell very unpleasing to the nostrils.
Coca Cola was "giving back" to Plachimada, the give-back taking the form
of the toxic sludge, along with profuse daily donations of foul wastewater.
The company told the locals the sludge was good for the land and dumped
loads of it in the surrounding fields and on the banks of the irrigation
canal, heralding it as free fertilizer. Aside from stinking so badly it
made old folk and children sick, people coming in contact with it got
rashes and kindred infections and the crops which it was supposed to
nourish died.
Lab analysis by the Kerala State Pollution Control Board has shown
dangerous levels of cadmium in the sludge. Another report done at Exeter
University in England at the request of the BBC Radio 4 (whose reporter
John Waite visited Plachimada and broadcast his report in July of 2003)
found in water in a well near the plant not only impermissible amounts
of cadmium but lead at levels that "could have devastating
consequences", particularly for pregnant women. The Exeter lab also
found the sludge useless as fertiliser, a finding which did not faze
Coca-Cola's Indian vice-president Sunil Gupta who swore the sludge was
"absolutely safe" and "good for crops".
Plachimada is in a district, the Perumatti
Panchayat, ruled by the Janata Dal (Secular). M.P. Veerendrakumar is the
President of the Kerala state unit of this party and represents the
constituency of Kozhikode in the Indian Parliament. Veerendrakumar is
also chairman and managing director of Mathrubhumi, a newspaper which
sells over a million copies a day in Malayalam, Kerala's language.
Veerendrakumar, a forceful man in his late sixties and a former federal
minister, tells me that for the past two years Mathrubhumi has refused
to run any ads for Coca-Cola and the company's other brand names drinks
such as Mirinda, 7 Up, Sprite, Fanta, Kinley Soda, Thums Up.
Veerendrakumar's group includes in its ban ads for Pepsi, which he says
has a plant ten kilometers from Plachimada that has produced the same
problems. He says his company's net loss of advertising revenue amounts
thus far to some 30 million rupees, more than $700,000, a very hefty sum
in Kerala, though far, far less as he told India's parliament in
Delhi, than what farmers around Plachimada have collectively lost
through crop failure consequent on the loss of water.
"The cruel fact", Veerendrakumar told the Indian parliament as he handed
over a well-documented report on the toxic outputs of the plant, "is
that water from our underground sources is pumped out free and sold to
our people to make millions every day, at the same time destroying our
environment and damaging the health of our people. For us rivers, dams
and water sources are the property of the nation and her people."
The locals won't let the plant reopen, to the fury of Kerala's present
pro-Coke government, which has tried, unconstitutionally, to overrule
the local council (it told the panchayat it could only spend $5 a day in
public money on its case) and hopes the courts will do the right thing
and grease Coca-Cola's wheels. Kerala's High Court did just that last
week, and the panchayat, helped by private donations, is now taking its
cased to India's Supreme Court. K. Krishnan, President of the Perumatti
Panchayat, where the Coca-Cola plant is situated, has withstood all
blandishments, which is more than can be said about many other individuals.
Drive along almost any road in Kerala and you'll see cocoanut palms.
What Keralites term as tender cocoanut water really is good for you. Ask
any local rat. A trio of biochemists at the University of Kerala
recently put rats on it and their levels of cholesterol and
triglycerides sank significantly, with anti-oxidant enzymes putting up a
fine show. For the rats dosed on Coca-Cola the tests readings weren't
pretty, starting with "short, swollen, ulcerated and broken villi in the
intestine and severe nuclear damage".
"What is the use of the Coca-Cola Company," cried Phulwanti Mhase of
Kudus village, in Maharashtra state, where women wash clothes in dirty
puddles after Hindustan Coca-Cola built a plant there. "These are
outsiders. They take our water, filter it and then resell it to us at a
price."
Phulwanti is cited (in a very useful pamphlet put out by the All India
Democratic Women's Association) as issuing this brisk précis of Marx's
Capital from the vantage point of her teashop from which can be descried
the outlines of the plant, which churns out sodas including a mineral
water called Kinley. Phulwanti has one bottle of Kinley in her store for
people passing through, remarking, "I get angry. This is our water and
they sell it to us for 12 rupees, which is what a tribal woman would
make for eight hours' work."
Taking a leaf out of the self-realization catechism, Coca-Cola flaunts
its slogan in Hindi, "Jo chahe ho jahe", meaning "Whatever you want,
happens" , translated by the local women as "Jo Coke chahe ho jahe",
"Whatever Coke wants, happens."
But not in Plachimada.
Footnote: A much shorter version of this can be found in the print
edition of The Nation that went to press earlier this week. I'll be
running a long account of my first trip to India in two or three issues
of CounterPunch newsletter, starting with the May 1-15 edition,
available to subscribers only. Though I say it myself, it's lively
stuff. Best make sure your sub is in order now.
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