The Hindu Business Line : Water, water, everywhere

NOR any drop to drink, as the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in The Ancient Mariner. Closer home in Kerala, in Plachimada in Palakkad district, poets of a more contemporary era rubbed shoulders with writers, farmers, villagers and activists to echo the very same sentiment of loss and deprivation.

Only this time, their canvas was not the vast icy seas off the South Pole that Coleridge's mariner had to navigate but the harsh and cruel reality of acres of farmland bled dry by rampant groundwater depletion.

In Kerala, nothing symbolises this more dramatically than the agitation by farmers and tribals against the Hindustan Coca-Cola plant, set up in 1998. The anti-Coke campaigners allege that the Coke plant, situated on a 16-acre plot of land, has plundered the area of most of its groundwater stocks, causing wells and farmsteads to dry up in almost all of Plachimada's villages.

At the just-concluded World Water Conference in Plachimada, Jose Bove, leader of the French farmers' organization, Confederation Paysanne, fresh from his advocacy efforts at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, said: "This struggle at Plachimada is part of the worldwide struggle against trans-national companies which exploit natural resources like water. They have made water a priced commodity to make profit. It is better for Coca-Cola to shut down its operations in this village. We will take this issue across the globe as the finest example of over-exploitation of water resources by companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi."

These may indeed sound like harsh words, but Bove is a seasoned campaigner, who revels in being accused of being a "troublemaker." Yet, even discounting for the extremism of a political environmental activist, it is difficult to brush aside the impassioned accusations of hundreds of disadvantaged people, driven to the streets by a lack of that most fundamental of daily necessities - water, the source of life itself. Today the water debate has become a human rights issue.

In `Water as Commodity: The Wrong Prescription', a study by Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, Maude Barlow, the author, warns: "By the year 2025, as much as two-thirds of the world's population will be living with water shortages or absolute water scarcity." The report argues for strong national and international laws to promote watershed protection, water conservation, reclaim polluted water systems, develop water supply restrictions, and bring the rule of law to corporations that continue to pollute.

Unlike the other cases of alleged corporate culpability - pesticides in Coke samples and worms in Cadbury chocolates - the Plachimada episode is in a different league altogether. It impinges on a basic human and environmental right, and thus deserves to be examined from a humane and critical platform.

Coca-Cola operates in several countries around the world. How have the governments of these countries ensured that the multinational functions responsibly and in the ultimate interests of their citizens? Surely, in the answer to that question lies pointers to a failure of a larger magnitude in the State of Kerala, where the present drama is unfolding.

The writer can be contacted at kg@tug.org.in

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