The Court ruled that the five-fold increase in groundwater withdrawals, requested by the company will aggravate the water supply situation even further, which has significantly deteriorated since the arrival of Coca-Cola in India in 1999. (…)
One Coca-Cola enterprise only uses one million liters per day. However, the production of the final product (600 bottles per minute) requires a quarter of the withdrawn ground water volume. A large part of it becomes waste which is discharged, without a full cycle of purification, into the environment and reaching the fields and water reservoirs, causing their contamination (…)
Another problem for Coca-Cola became the territorial aspect. Business expansion requires new areas, part of which is in the ownership of the communities, and the private usage of which is prohibited by Indian law. At the end of 2013, the Mehdiganj local authorities issued an order which envisaged evicting Coca-Cola from the territories unlawfully taken by it.