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India's cola controversy
widens
By Raju Bist
MUMBAI -
It all began on Tuesday when Sunita Narain, director of
the Center for Science and Environment (CSE), called a
press conference in New Delhi. "Twelve major cold drink
brands manufactured by Coca-Cola and Pepsi and sold in
and around Delhi contain a deadly cocktail of pesticide
residues," she told reporters. "These pesticides include
potent chemicals which can cause cancers, damage the
nervous and reproductive systems and reduce bone mineral
density," she added.
The short press conference
would soon put the two cola bottlers in the spotlight,
lead to an outcry from the floor of the Indian
parliament and ignite protests all across the country.
The cola bottlers are being inexorably drawn into a
nation-wide controversy that shows no sign of abating.
Assembly elections are to be held in three important
states, with general elections six months away.
Multinational-bashing, a favorite political pastime,
appears inevitable.
Indeed, the Bharatiya Janata
Yuva Morcha (BJYM), the ruling BJP's youth wing, said on
Wednesday that it would seek to "teach the two bottlers
a lesson, threatening to launch a batli-todo
[bottle breaking] agitation all over the country
from Thursday if the government did not withdraw
supplies of Coca-Cola and Pepsi. (Most soft drinks
continue to be sold in India in glass bottles.)
The non-government organization's findings were
immediately denounced by Sanjiv Gupta, president and CEO
of Coca-Cola India and Rajiv Bakshi, chairman of Pepsi
India, who said that the CSE report was "baseless" and
that they were open to the idea of testing by an
internationally-accredited independent laboratory. "Our
products are tested by top-grade laboratories like the
Wimta laboratory in Hyderabad [south India] and the
T&O laboratory in the Netherlands. They are of world
class and the same as what we sell in Europe and the
US," they said by way of a joint declaration.
Nonetheless, the charges are not that easy to
dismiss. Both Coke and Pepsi have been hit with other
charges of environmental degradation over the past few
months. And CSE, perhaps India's most reputable NGO,
declared that its tests had been conducted at its
pollution monitoring laboratory and had discovered
residues of four extremely toxic pesticides and
insecticides - lndane, DDT, malathion and chlorpyrifos -
in Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Diet Pepsi, Mirinda Orange,
Mirinda Lemon, Blue Pepsi, 7-Up, Coca-Cola, Fanta,
Limca, Sprite and Thums Up. The samples had been
purchased from different parts of the capital city
between the months of April and August, she said.
Narain said that in all the samples, the levels
of pesticide residues far exceeded the maximum residue
limit for pesticides in water used as "food", set down
by the European Economic Commission (EEC). In all the
PepsiCo brands, the total pesticides on an average were
36 times higher than the EEC limits. The Coca-Cola
brands contained levels 30 times higher. "Our findings
cannot be ignored," said Narain. "The demand for these
soft drinks is on the rise. On an average, an Indian
consumes six bottles and every Delhite 50 bottles in a
year."
As in many other parts of the world,
controversy is nothing new to the Indian operations of
Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Had it been any other organization
leveling the charges, they could have dismissed it as
yet another case of MNC-bashing. But CSE was founded two
decades ago by the late Anil Agarwal, a crusading
environmentalist. Its chairman is Dr M S Swaminathan,
one of India's foremost agricultural scientists and
winner of international accolades like the Ramon
Magsaysay Award, the World Food Prize and the Tyler
Environment Award.
It was the CSE that led a
sustained and successful campaign against vehicular
pollution in New Delhi which resulted in India's Supreme
Court asking all commercial vehicles to switch over to
the much cleaner compressed natural gas fuel last year.
It has now launched a rainwater harvesting campaign that
asks governmental bodies to take measures to keep water
clean by not allowing polluting activities to take place
in the catchment area. The CSE is also in the forefront
against pollution in Indian rivers, streams and lakes.
Narain's press conference was beamed live on all
major TV channels and carried on the front page of
afternoon papers. Alarmed at the potential damage all
the bad publicity could bring to their Indian
businesses, the two MNCs decided to fight back by giving
their own versions. The arch rivals also did something
unique – burying their differences, the executives of
the two companies thus called a joint press conference.
That did little to stem the tide of protest.
Reacting to the CSE report, the government dropped the
sodas from parliament's canteen. The ban was announced
by E Ahmed, chairman of the committee on food
management, while participating in an impromptu debate
in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of parliament) on the
CSE's findings. Simultaneously, the government announced
that it would work on revised quality norms for
carbonated beverages. One of the proposals being mooted:
only bottled water be used to manufacture soft drinks.
The monsoon session of the Indian parliament is
now in progress and on the next day, it was the turn of
Indian health minister, Sushma Swaraj, to respond to the
concerns raised by members of parliament. She described
the issue as "serious and startling" and told them that
the government had sought a report on the CSE findings.
"The government will take steps keeping in mind the
collective wisdom of the members here. I will collect
all the facts and come back to the house," she said.
Swaraj is a minister of the BJP, the largest of
the 23-member coalition government that is now in power
in New Delhi. She and other senior BJP ministers assured
journalists that the government would investigate the
matter thoroughly and if needed, the legal machinery of
the government would be asked to inquire into the
matter.
Meanwhile, the east Indian state of West
Bengal, India's last bastion of communism and where MNCs
have always feared to open shop, has decided to inspect
all Coca-Cola and Pepsi plants in its territories. Also,
the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Maharashtra,
India's most industrialized state, has decided to
undertake a project to test samples from water sources
used by cola and bottled water manufacturers. "If our
tests prove the presence of insecticides in the soft
drinks then we will cancel the licenses given to the
five plants," warned FDA commissioner Uttam Khobragade
in a press statement.
But environmentalist Sampa
Banerjee does not feel that the results of the CSE's
findings in New Delhi will be replicated all over the
country. "Unlike places like Maharashtra, there are more
pesticides in north Indian areas like New Delhi because
they are mostly agrarian regions," she says. The whole
problem has arisen, she continues, because the companies
have tried to save in two ways - by using ground water
instead of bottled water as a raw material (water
constitutes 80 percent of any soft drink by volume) and
by not investing in cleaning up contaminated ground
water.
The contaminated soft drinks controversy
could not have come at a worse time for the two majors.
The Indian public – which revels at the sight of MNCs
squirming – has still not forgotten the two being hauled
up the Supreme Court for causing environmental damage to
the Rohtang Pass area in the Upper Himalayas by painting
their advertisements on rocks. The court imposed a
penalty of Rs 200,000 (US$4,300)each on Coca-Cola and
Pepsi.
Coca-Cola, in particular, has been
receiving a lot of bad press. Its celebrity icon, actor
Salman Khan, is now facing trial after being involved in
a hit and run case, accused of killing a Mumbai citizen
with his Toyota SUV six months ago. More recently, the
Greenpeace Environment Trust, the Indian arm of the
international NGO, urged the Kerala State Pollution
Control Board (KSPCB) to serve a closure notice on
Coca-Cola India's bottling plant at Plachimada in
Palakkad district in the south Indian state of Kerala.
The accusation: the sludge produced at the facility and
supplied to farmers as fertilizer contained dangerous
levels of cadmium and lead.
A probe was launched
by the Kerala government to check out the hazardous
content in the fertilizers. And on the day the two cola
majors were being boycotted by Indian parliamentarians,
the KSPCB announced its verdict: there were indeed high
levels of cadmium in the Coca-Cola sludge. The KSPCB has
now instructed the company not to let the sludge out of
factory premises and not to use it as fertilizer, even
within the premises, as a matter of precaution.
The Coca-Cola senior management is refusing to
be drawn into reacting to the KSPCB verdict, saying it
has still not read the judgment in full. But it is more
than willing to speak out against Narain and the CSE
findings. "All this talk of pesticides in our soft
drinks is humbug. My children drink the same products at
home," says Gupta. "There seems to be a hidden agenda
among all this backlash," adds Bakshi, without
elaborating. Both the MNC chiefs added they were
contemplating legal action against the CSE.
But
legal recourse may not end Coca-Coca and Pepsi's woes.
In fact, it may just aggravate them. For six months down
the road, assembly elections are going to be held in
three important Indian states and general elections are
scheduled after a further six months. Election
campaigning has already begun, slowly but assiduously.
The reaction in the Lok Sabha canteen, minister
Swaraj's assurance to her fellow parliamentarians, the
BJP youth wing's theatrical posturing, all point to a
favorite past-time among Indian politicians, one that
goes down very well with the common Indian public - MNC
bashing.
Before independence, British
institutions were at the receiving end. Later,
particularly after the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal,
it is the MNCs who have been brought into the line of
fire. The agitation is expected to intensify in the
coming days.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
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