Between Coke & Modi, Better Ground Water Management

Coca-Cola in Uttar Pradesh and Narendra Modi Under Pressure to Improve Groundwater Management

Savitri Rai winces as she recounts how police beat her when she protested against groundwater extraction at a Coca-Cola Co. plant near her farm in India. A decade later, she said her water supplies keep dwindling. "We have to dig ever deeper wells," the 60-year-old said outside her mud house in Mehadiganj village in Uttar Pradesh, blaming the beverage company's bottling line a kilometer away.

Coca-Cola, which declined to comment on Rai's allegations, in August scrapped a $24 million expansion at the site, citing delays in permits to extract more water. Such flashpoints add pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to improve groundwater management in the world's biggest user of the resource as he seeks to transform India into a manufacturing hub.

Growing aquifer overexploitation by farms, businesses and cities imperils India's development goals, according to the World Bank, signaling challenges for industries from mining to brewing in need of reliable water sources. "You have unregulated use of a resource which is not easily renewed," said Upmanu Lall, a professor of earth and environmental engineering at Columbia University in New York.

"It's a really significant concern over the whole country." India draws 230 cubic kilometers of groundwater a year, more than a quarter of the global total, World Bank data shows. Agriculture uses the most, growing about 70% of India's grains with it, followed by industry.

Arm's length

The $1.9 trillion economy operates the world's biggest food subsidy programme, and about 742 million people live in rural areas, making farming an economic lifeline.

While groundwater is the main drinking water for more than 1.5 billion people worldwide, pollutants such as arsenic make it unfit for humans in a third of India's 600 districts, WWF India and Accenture Plc said last year. The country faces some of the world's worst water challenges, they said. In Mehadiganj, about 20km from the holy city of Varanasi, 28-year-old farmer Sabita Rai said she used to extract water with buckets attached to ropes only as long as her arm. Then the wells dried up.

"We're too poor to drill deeper," she said, adding that her searches for water now extend further from her home. Kamlesh Sharma, a spokesman for Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Pvt. Ltd, Coca-Cola's Indian business, said the company had no further comments about the plant at Mehadiganj beyond a 22 August letter to the Uttar Pradesh state government.

Shared risk

In the letter, the company said an "inordinate" delay in getting clearances from the Central Ground Water Authority for greater extraction set back the Rs.145 crore expansion, causing financial losses. The area is classified as "critical" for groundwater, according to the letter, and the company took required steps such as rainwater harvesting to recharge twice the amount of water to be abstracted.

Coca-Cola said it plans to find a new Uttar Pradesh site for the planned 600 bottle-a-minute plant while continuing to run its 15-year-old returnable glass bottle line at Mehadiganj. Water quality and availability in India are "already interrupting operations for some companies," said Joe Phelan, a director at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development in New Delhi. "The key is for more companies to engage with communities and fellow water users in reducing shared water risk."

Source: LiveMint

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• Water Management
• Groundwater Recharge