The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [129]
Before leaving Jaipur, Ranjan and Sharma drive up to a school where Sharma points out pipes attached to the walls. They funnel rain collected on the rooftop to an open rectangular tank. At one end is a concrete circle a foot or two across filled in with sand and gravel. That’s just the top of the “recharge shaft,” says Sharma, a two-hundred-foot bore well that filters water directly down into the aquifer.
The system can recharge 1.3 million liters of water annually “if the rainfall is average,” says Sharma, meaning 560 millimeters of rain over the four rainy months between June and September. Asked about the actual recharge of the shaft, Ranjan replies that the company hasn’t yet instituted a means for measuring that, though they are working on it. A school official leading the tour says the system has fixed previous problems with water scarcity, even though “we still have a problem in summer.” Sharma immediately corrects him: “No, you have no problems.” Looking a bit flustered, the official clarifies, “In the summer months, we had problems. Now we have no problems.”
While Coca-Cola admits that rainwater harvesting in Jaipur does nothing to recharge the aquifer in Kala Dera, Ranjan says the company has installed some 150 projects within three kilometers of the plant, constructed atop other buildings or positioned in riverbeds to catch runoff. And that’s not all the company has done to help local farmers. In 2005, the company upgraded Kala Dera’s general hospital, its women’s hospital, and even its veterinary hospital. And along the road to the village, it has partnered to create a “farm education center” to teach farmers new “drip irrigation” methods that use 70 percent less water than flood irrigation traditionally used by farmers.
Those corporate social responsibility efforts have earned the company goodwill among at least some in the village, including a farmer with scraggly salt-and-pepper hair and a long white kurta whom Ranjan introduces. The water level has stabilized at around ninety feet below the ground, says the man, who works as a building contractor in addition to growing wheat and spinach on seven acres of land. Those who have protested the plant, he continued, are outsiders from other villages jealous of the improvements Coke has made there. The principal of another school where Coke has instituted rainwater harvesting goes further, saying that the protesters are “day laborers” from another village paid to swell the ranks at protests.
There’s no question in their minds who did the hiring—Amit Srivastava and his local representative, a Jaipur-based activist named Sawai Singh. According to Sharma, Srivastava shows up a day before or a day after the protests, hiring laborers from the neighboring village of Chamu to take part in the demonstrations at 100 rupees ($2) a pop. Local organizers, he says, Srivastava hires for 2,000 rupees ($100) a month.
Srivastava himself arrives in Kala Dera’s marketplace an hour later, baseball cap covering his eyes, and accompanied by several of those local organizers he’s been accused of hiring for money. When told of Coke’s contention that he’s paying off the village, he laughs. Far from orchestrating a protest movement from eight thousand miles away, Srivastava contends that it’s Coca-Cola India that is manipulating public opinion in the area. “This is a big corporate scam,” he says, “we’ll show you all of it.”
Together, they lead the way to a school just behind the marketplace, quite a different scene from the ones Ranjan and Sharma have shown off. Here, the pipes that run down from the roof are rusting and broken, and in at least one case taped together with packing tape. Behind the school, the concrete basin to collect the water is cracked in several places. No matter the condition of the structures,