Weekend Edition
April 16 / 17, 2005
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 PerumattiPanchayat,
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 three 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 to a very hefty sum for 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.