What went wrong?
As per the agreement struck by the company with the KSPCB, up to 1.5 million litres of water was drawn commercially from 6 bore-wells situated inside the factory compound. The permit granted Coca-Cola the right to extract ground water to meet its production demands of 3.8 litres of water for a litre of cola.
As a result, the water table receded, as did the quality of groundwater. Detailed sampling of the water collected from the region revealed high concentration of calcium, and magnesium ions.
Moreover, the colloidal slurry that was generated as a by-product was initially sold to villagers as fertilizer.
In 2003, the BBC, in its Face The Facts programme, declared that samples of slurry that was being deployed as fertilizer were found to contain dangerous levels of toxic metals and the known carcinogen, cadmium.
"The area's farming industry has been devastated and jobs, as well as the health of the local people, have been put at risk," said John Waite, the show's presenter, as he read out the verdict of scientists from the University of Exeter, where samples collected from Plachimada were sent for analysis.
In a white paper titled Spatial Assessment of Groundwater Quality in Kerala, researchers from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore infer that Palakkad's groundwater fares badly on most counts, having a large number of dissolved minerals, above the desirable limit.
Plachimada has been mentioned for failing to meet the quality norms on salinity, alkalinity, and high traces of magnesium, and chloride, among other minerals.
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