The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [117]
The real problems with the company, however, began when the farmers surrounding the plant began to experience problems with their crops and livestock they had never had before. The day after the graduation ceremony, Nandlal introduces a group of villagers who have gathered under a thatched awning to tell their tale. “The first major problem was that Coca-Cola used to discharge this wastewater. It was reaching the farmers’ land and destroying the land, making the land barren,” states Urmika Vishwakarma, a woman who has worked with Lok Samiti to administer micro-loans to women in the village. “All the animals who drank it died; anyone who touched it got blisters.”
Originally, Coke channeled its wastewater through a culvert under the Grand Trunk Highway into a canal that eventually made its way into the Ganges. In December 2002, however, the government blocked the culvert during highway reconstruction, spilling effluent into the fields. For months, the water pooled by the side of the highway, turning the fields into a rank, fly-drawing soup.
At that time, several villagers came to Lok Samiti to help. As they began to investigate, the farmers told Nandlal about a more insidious practice by which the bottling plant had been distributing the sludge from the plant’s wastewater treatment—a dry, white-colored ash—to farmers as fertilizer. After they used this ash, says Vishwakarma, “nothing would grow.” Then there was the drought. The entire state of Uttar Pradesh—of which Varanasi is a part—began experiencing water shortages in 2002, when the yearly monsoons began to fail. But the villagers around Mehdiganj say that their problems began several years earlier, when water levels began to drop precipitously around the Coca-Cola plant. The villagers now gather around an open well in the center of the village, sending a metal bucket down on a rope some sixty or seventy feet. Only in the last few inches does it hit water. Another well nearby is completely dry—one of ninety-seven wells that Lok Samiti says have dried out since the plant began operation in 2000, nearly half of the 223 wells they have surveyed in villages neighboring the plant.
The villagers name a number of factors in that decline—including lack of rainfall and drought. But as in Chiapas, they blame also Coke’s deep bore wells for literally sucking their land dry—exacerbating an existing problem if not causing the problem itself. Under the leadership of Lok Samiti, the villagers staged their first rally in front of the plant in May 2003, drawing only a few dozen people to protest. At the same time, they appealed to the local district magistrate, who ordered Coke to clean up its spilled wastewater and install a pipe under the highway to divert wastewater into a canal flowing into the Ganges. Not that the new drain fixed the problem; it just moved it to a less visible location. Across the highway from the plant in Mehdiganj, Nandlal leads the way through fields to a spot in one canal where a pipe protrudes. “There, that’s where the Coca-Cola plant discharges their water,” he says, pointing to an area where the water is scummy and green, with dried patches of white powder on the rocks.
A local farmer who lives a few yards away says the fields close to where the water comes out of the pipe are unproductive compared with those in other areas. If the water from the canal is used to grow sugarcane, it has an off taste. Once, when the plant restarted operations after shutting down a length of time, the canal overflowed into his fish pond, killing all of the fish he was raising for sale. Neighbors, he claims, have lost cows or buffalos. “I am not a doctor, I am not sure how they died,” he says. “But they drank that water.”
The plant itself is sectioned off the highway by two gates topped with barbed wire. Unlike representatives of Coca-Cola FEMSA, who refuse to even talk about their operations, much less show off a bottling plant, the local bottler Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Pvt. Ltd. agrees to a tour