The Coke Machine (36 page)

CSE’s Kushal Yadav, however, disputes Coke’s contention that “everything has pesticides.” In fact, he says, tests on fruits, vegetables, and sugar found relatively few cases of pesticide contamination. If soft drinks were contaminated, he concluded, it was from the groundwater that Coke was not cleaning—despite the state-of-the-art water-intake treatment system that the company now shows off at its plant in Mehdiganj.

Whatever the cause, the pesticide story garnered more anti-Coke press in a week than the struggles around groundwater depletion and contamination had in over a year. Coke’s most valuable asset—its brand—had been tarnished, and its reputation called into question. A public that had mostly ignored a problem affecting the very livelihood of some of the world’s most desperate people had been galvanized by contamination of a daily treat for the middle class. On the other hand, if it weren’t for the pesticide situation, the overmatched villagers fighting Coke plants in Kerala may never have achieved the opening for national—and international—recognition.

“On the contrary,” says Yadav. The pesticide issue “brought out in the open the other issues. Groundwater depletion, groundwater pollution, all of these issues came to the fore.” And in the summer of 2003, they began emerging in Coke’s home country as well, as the situation in India garnered more and more press in the United States—mostly through the work of one Indian-American activist who worked tirelessly to raise the issue.

 

 

 

Amit Srivastava
was born in the United States, when his father, a business management professor, was on a sabbatical at the University of Illinois. His parents were originally from the Indian state of Bihar, a few hundred miles east of Varanasi. He spent his childhood in Tanzania and India, getting a crash course in poverty before going back to Illinois for high school. Originally, he entered the University of Illinois for computer engineering but felt increasingly under pressure to
do
, not to learn. “I realized very quickly I was never cut out for college work,” he says in a taxi, speeding through the agricultural fields outside Varanasi. After his nontraditional upbringing, he never lost a sense of outrage wherever he saw exploitation in his adopted homeland. He dropped out of college and began traveling around the country to organize college students to fight for environmental justice in their communities—frequently involving big corporations he accused of polluting the environment and exploiting people.

Now sporting a ponytail and baseball cap, he looks like he is hardly out of college, despite his forty-four years of age. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, he was frustrated by a lack of awareness of the environmental justice issues he was pushing. Environmentalism then was about saving whales and rain forests, not exposing cancer clusters around Baton Rouge. But he continued fighting, traveling overseas to Norway and Japan to tackle issues in those countries as well. When India began liberalizing its economy in the 1990s, he was naturally drawn home.

“At the time, the entry of corporations into India was a new thing,” he says. “I realized the movement in India could stand to benefit from an active movement in some of these countries like the United States where decisions were being made.” He launched the India Resource Center in 2002 with a budget of $60,000 a year, much of it originally provided by Body Shop founder Anita Roddick—a true believer in the spirit of corporate social responsibility who had recently traveled to Plachimada and decried Coke’s insensitivity there. After traveling there himself the following year, Srivastava knew he’d found a nemesis worthy of his time. “I’ll spend my whole life on Coca-Cola if I have to, why not?” he asks.

Despite the growing attention Plachimada was receiving in the international press, the local activists in Kerala were skeptical of being co-opted by international nonprofits who wanted to use the fight to push their own issues. Srivastava came to them with the proposal not to support their struggle from afar but to take the issue to the home of Coke itself—the United States. “The whole point is not to support the struggle, it is to join the struggle,” says C. R. Bijoy. “One of the people who picked up on this was Amit.”

Like Ray Rogers, Srivastava realized early on that the vulnerability of Coke lay in its brand image. In fact, he hooked up with Rogers in New York in spring 2004 “walking out with two boxes full of propaganda” to begin organizing on college campuses. From then on, anytime SINALTRAINAL raised its own issues on campus, it also mentioned India; when Srivastava made his own visits to campuses, he brought up anti-union violence in Colombia. While Srivastava admits that the Indian situation isn’t as dramatic as the murders that took place in Colombia, he argues that in some ways it is more compelling, since the bottling plants there were actually owned by the company in Atlanta, not contracted out to a separate franchisee, making Coke’s alleged infractions more direct. And while the violent civil war in Colombia is unique, Coke’s water use is an issue all over the world.

 

 

 

An increasingly
militant movement in both Plachimada and Mehdiganj began using more direct tactics to put pressure on Coke. Word of the BBC report about Coke’s toxic sludge gave new fire to the community in Mehdiganj, which demanded its local pollution control board carry out tests. But Uttar Pradesh (UP), the state in which Varanasi is located, is not Kerala. Both culturally and politically, the state is strictly ordered along caste lines, with the Shudra and Dalit castes populating the rural villages strictly separated from the Brahmin and Kshatriya castes populating finance and industry. It also has a reputation for being one of the more corrupt states in the country. In 2009, a few months before the Lok Samiti graduation ceremony, police arrested the regional head of the state pollution control board in Varanasi—the person responsible for overseeing the Mehdiganj Coke plant. They charged him with taking a bribe from another business in exchange for a “no objection” certificate allowing it to operate.

Years earlier, however, the pollution control board not only declined to test Coke’s sludge, but also denied Coke was even distributing it to farmers. “The pollution control board said, ‘We have visited the village and they are not doing this,’ ” says Nandlal. “ ‘If you have seen this, show it to us.’” Exasperated, he and his fellow activists appeared at the board’s offices one day with a sack full of sludge and dumped it on the desk of the clerk: “We kind of took him hostage.” Several dozen protesters blocked the main entrance until officials agreed to investigate.

By this time, the establishments in Mehdiganj and Plachimada weren’t the only bottling plants facing controversy. A study by the state pollution board in West Bengal found toxic levels of cadmium in the effluent of three plants around Kolkata. And in 2003, the Central Pollution Control Board conducted tests of sludge from sixteen Coke and Pepsi plants—and found eight Coke plants to have excessive levels of lead and cadmium. And it added a third toxin: chromium, a heavy metal that causes skin rashes and dermatitis on contact and is a suspected carcinogen with repeated ingestion. The agency henceforth ordered Coca-Cola to treat its waste as hazardous, requiring disposal in specially lined concrete landfills.

More recently, the nonprofit Hazards Centre has continued to confirm the presence of toxic heavy metals around Coke plants. Located on Delhi’s southern fringes in a cramped concrete apartment building, the office is a buzzing hive of young researchers sitting around computers. In the middle sits director Dunu Roy, sporting a white ponytail and balding slightly on top.

Roy’s group first did an assessment of Plachimada’s groundwater back in 2006; since then it has done assessments of water conditions at five other Coke plants around India, publishing a report in 2010. In each location, the scientists measured the presence of lead, cadmium, and chromium in both the groundwater and the effluent coming directly out of the plant. All five plants contained chromium, some in levels of up to eleven times government limits. In addition, cadmium was found at two plants, including Mehdiganj, and lead at one. In summary, says Roy, “two things are incontrovertible.” One: that the water draining directly out of the plant contains heavy metals. And two: that contamination in the groundwater decreases as one gets farther away from the plants.

So what about the wastewater treatment plant that Ranjan so proudly showed off at the Mehdiganj plant? Roy takes one look at the data showing limits on pH, dissolved solids, and oxygen demand, and immediately says that Coke is tracking the wrong numbers. That data, he says, will tell you only if the water is potable, not that it is free from chemical contamination. None of the aeration or filtering that Hindustan Coke does will remove heavy metals, he says, which need to be percolated out using salts. Not only is that process expensive, but then you are left with hazardous solid waste that needs to be disposed of. The bioassay with the two fish, he adds, is completely laughable, completely failing the scientific protocol for such a test. “To do this bioassay, you need to have six tanks with different concentrations in the water, with twenty fish in each tank,” he says. “So you’d need 120 fish in all.”

 

 

 

Increasingly armed
with countrywide data, the various campaigns against Coca-Cola began coordinating their activities. Ajayan and Nandlal met for the first time in January 2004, along with Srivastava and other international activists, at the World Social Forum, an annual progressive strategy session-cum-spring break for lefties that coincides with the meeting of the world’s political and financial masters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Held in Mumbai, the forum featured a march of some five hundred people to protest Coke, led by Indian environmentalist Medha Patkar; SINALTRAINAL president Javier Correa was marching right alongside.

Immediately afterward, several dozen environmental activists came to Plachimada for a somewhat grandiosely named World Water Conference, a three-day who’s who of lefties, including Canadian water activists Tony Clarke and Maude Barlow, French antiglobalist farmer José Bové, and Bolivian peasant leader Oscar Olivera, who had organized a successful peasant movement against water privatization by Bechtel in Cochabamba. There the activists struck a militant tone, calling on Coke to “Quit India”—the same slogan Gandhi used in his long fight against British occupation.

Nandlal and his fellow activists evoked Gandhi’s spirit more confrontationally in Mehdiganj, where they began a hunger strike in front of the plant in January 2004. Coke obtained a restraining order prohibiting protests within three hundred meters (despite the fact that some of the protesters actually
lived
within that radius), which was violated in late 2004 with a ten-day march of some one thousand villagers, some carrying “Quit India” signs in a direct evocation of Gandhi’s March to the Sea.

By the time they arrived at the plant in Mehdiganj, a cordon of police was waiting, blocking the entrance. In a group, the villagers surged past the three-hundred-meter line, as police began striking them with batons. Even as the protesters dropped to the ground in pain, heads and arms bleeding, they say, they held to a vow of nonviolence (with one well-marked apparent exception of an elderly woman who took off her slipper and began hitting a policeman with it).

In all, says Nandlal, police arrested more than 350 people, including more than forty women. He himself spent fifteen days in jail, shaken by the violence—especially seeing police beating women from his village. “It was really painful,” he says. “I thought about giving up. But the community had not given up.” In fact, it was the women who pushed to continue the protests. “Women are most in need of water,” says Vishwakarma, “to clean, cook, bathe—their whole lives are dependent on water. Men have a limit, but when women are angry, they will never stop.” A few weeks after the violence, some five hundred marchers wearing black ribbons over their mouths marched up to the three-hundred-meter line, standing silently in protest. A year later, in 2005, police stood aside as eight hundred people marched right up to the gates.

 

 

 

At the same time
, the battle lines had been drawn more metaphorically in Kerala, now with the state’s opposition political parties and the village council on one side, and the state government and Coca-Cola on the other. When the case to decide Coke’s fate finally went to court, Kerala’s high court returned two conflicting decisions—first declaring in December 2003 that the company’s groundwater extraction was “illegal” and the
panchayat
was justified in canceling the license; and then on appeal, saying the council had acted without sufficient information, and needed to do a groundwater study first.

In light of a crippling drought that year, however, the state’s chief minister declared in February 2004 the plant would be banned from extracting groundwater until the government’s study was completed. The pickets at the hut went on for another year as the two sides waited for the results, which eventually came as a victory for Coke in February 2005, ruling that the company could extract up to half a million liters a day without affecting groundwater.

Asked about the ruling, the former village council president Krishnan discounts the study, contending that the company must have bribed the government officials who conducted it. “The thing is very simple, because they tried to bribe me,” he says impatiently, contending that he was approached by Coke officials offering money for “community or personal development.” While Krishnan declines to say how much, another source says the offer was as high as $200,000—a small fortune in India.

Still defiant, the
panchayat
appeared to follow the court order to renew the license in June 2005—but only if the company would agree to certain conditions, among them that Coke “divulge all of its ingredients.” In other words, the
panchayat
of a tiny village in southern India was asking Coke to provide it with the vaunted secret formula that the company had guarded for decades in an Atlanta safe-deposit box—a formula that the company had refused to give up years earlier in favor of leaving the entire country. The village council must have known that Coke would never comply.