#dnaEdit: Water wars cometh

The impossibility of ignoring local communities while clearing industrial projects is highlighted by the Tamil Nadu government’s decision to cancel the land allotment to Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Pvt Ltd, for setting up a bottling plant at Perundurai, in Erode district. In the years to come, such developmental tangles are bound to proliferate, as concerns over loss of livelihood from environmental degradation and land acquisition have increasingly begun to upstage the promise of jobs, national interest and GDP growth. This is a clear break from past practice when mega projects could be pushed through without meeting with such sustained resistance at the grass roots. The TN government claimed it acted after the company failed to respond to a query from the State Industries Promotion Corporation of Tamil Nadu(SIPCOT) highlighting farmers’ worries about groundwater depletion as a result of the plant’s activities. However, Hindustan Coca-Cola has also written to the state government saying it was withdrawing from the project “due to unforeseen pressures and delays”. With the company now demanding a refund, the face-off has spiralled into an interesting tit-for-tat. It was in 2013 that the government and Hindustan Coca-Cola inked a deal to set up a bottling plant for which 71 acres was allotted.

An interesting aspect of the ongoing recriminations between the company and government is that the government — for more than a year — paid no heed to the brewing local opposition. By the time the company was ready for consultations, public opinion was already set against the project. The problem with such public-private collaborations is that communities aspiring to be participants in development processes tend to be suspicious when their concerns regarding the project are not promptly addressed. In light of the overriding concerns of decreasing per capita water availability, this is especially true in the case of bottling plants for soft-drinks and beverages. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Perundurai farmers invoked the Plachimada agitation against Coca-Cola as inspiration for their own agitation. The politics of resistance on ground has gathered momentum in recent years. To their advantage, peoples’ movements against land acquisition, big dams, nuclear reactors and mining are now increasingly aware of the methods adopted by fellow agitators against similar development projects in other parts of the country.

The Plachimada agitation is significant because it resulted in a high-powered committee of the Kerala government imposing a penalty of Rs216 crore on Hindustan Coca-Cola. The committee’s report accused the company of violating conditions of the gram panchayat’s licence to draw water. The report also claimed to have evidence that the extraction — daily — of over 5 lakh litres of water, had depleted groundwater and noted massive loss of livelihood as a result of reduced agricultural productivity. For Tamil Nadu, a perennially water-scarce state, water is an emotive issue and it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the state government to ram through the Coca Cola project. But then it is not just Tamil Nadu which has to contend with such active people’s movements. Last year, a fully-built Coca Cola bottling plant in Mehdiganj in Uttar Pradesh and a proposed plant at Charba in Uttarakhand had to be shelved because of community opposition. The UP Pollution Control Board found that the company’s claims of recharging groundwater in Mehdiganj through rainwater harvesting, were just not adequate. With India having 16 per cent of the world’s population but just 4 per cent of its water resources, beverage companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo will have to look for new models of decentralising water collection or consider setting up the bottling plants near reservoirs and dams. Using borewells to extract groundwater is a strategy that is clearly not working — for both governments and companies.