The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [131]
When told of Sharma’s contention that the group hires day laborers to swell its numbers, Kuriji’s face crinkles with laughter. “Who has that kind of money?” he asks, incredulous. Ever the civil servant, he pulls out a photo album full of pictures of protests. “Do these look like hundred-rupees-a-day day laborers?” he asks, pointing to the faces of men much like those around his home for the wedding, simply dressed but not poor. Next, he opens a ledger book in which he’s written captions for each photo with name after name of participants, some with signatures beside them. “This is ample proof they are not day laborers,” he concludes.
Even so, the movement here has struggled to achieve the critical mass seen in Plachimada, or even Mehdiganj. The largest protest was in May 2004, when, a news report says, some two thousand people came to see Indian environmentalist Medha Patkar and local Gandhian social activist Sawai Singh. As in Kerala, Singh has helped bring a petition against the company, arguing that local people had the right to groundwater before a multinational corporation, but it was denied by the local court. Recently, however, Rajasthan has seen a change of government from the more conservative Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to the socialist-leaning Congress party, giving the community members hope that the issue will be revisited. “We are not ready for defeat,” says Kuriji. “We will carry on this agitation and Coke will get tired. We will certainly shut down the plant.”
Kala Dera isn’t the only place where Coke has pursued corporate social responsibility in India. By 2008, the company claimed to have more than three hundred rainwater-harvesting structures around the country. With the twenty-three projects around Mehdiganj, Coke India says it is able to recharge 46,933 cubic meters per year, versus the plant’s consumption of 38,191. In 2008, in fact, the company declared the plant to be “water neutral”—that is, it recharges more water than it extracts. According to Ranjan, the water levels in the area of the plant actually rose between 2007 and 2008, from twenty-eight feet to nineteen feet belowground. In order to make that claim, however, the company relies on the closest government monitoring site, three miles southwest of the plant. In an official document the company submitted to the local groundwater board, meanwhile, it admitted the level at the plant was eighty feet belowground.
The community also tells a different story about Coke’s rainwater harvesting. The figures for Coke’s recharge potential rely on an average rainfall of 1,000 millimeters a year, but in many of the past few years, it’s been only half that. What’s more, in 2008, activists say half of the rain fell on one day—overflowing the capacity of the rainwater storage tanks. As in Kala Dera, several rainwater harvesting structures are in dilapidated condition. On one, built on the rooftop of the local police station, the main pipe coming from the roof isn’t even connected to the underground tank. “No one has ever come here after the management first installed it,” says one police officer. “The pipes are all blocked and the water overflows.”
Ranjan dismisses the activists’ rainwater-harvesting tours as publicity tours. “They always take you to a place with a broken pipe,” he says, insisting that the company does an annual maintenance before the monsoons. Whether or not the structures are in working order, however, there is truth to back up the activists’ claims that there is simply not enough rain to make them work. Despite Coke’s claims that it recharged the water it took out in Kala Dera, government figures show that water levels still declined in Kala Dera by more than ten feet between 2007 and 2008. Rainfall levels for 2009, meanwhile, were only half of the prior year’s total.
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