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Coke and Pepsi are it, safely, in India

There have been few such long-winded efforts to say that Coke is still it.

Throughout the capital's bustling INA market, which sells everything from Oreo cookies made in China to "Hot Eats" of North India, soft drink vendors had posted fliers this week proclaiming that "Coca-Cola refreshes you with world-class and safe products in India."

The fliers, spread across the country as well, said Coke tested its sodas for pesticide parts per billion, an exercise as arduous as "tracing one person out of India's whole population." They even reassured customers that Coca-Cola India's 5,000 employees actually consume the soft drink they produce.

Why the earnest verbiage in place of catchy jingles?

Earlier this month, a respected nongovernmental group here, the Center for Science and Environment, released a report saying that tests on the 12 leading soft-drink brands had revealed unsafe levels of pesticides in all of them.

As it turned out, all twelve brands were owned by Coke and PepsiCo, which entered the Indian soft drink market in the early 1990s and conquered it, scooping up rival domestic brands along the way. Their sales promptly plunged after the center's report was published.

Much of the air drained out of the furor on Thursday when the Minister of Health and Family Welfare announced that government tests on 12 samples had not found unsafe levels of pesticides.

The soft drink giants pronounced themselves vindicated, saying that the government had called their products "perfectly safe." A joint statement said that the companies have "full faith in the Indian authorities to develop fact and science-based standards."

But the center's director, Sunita Narain, said she was at a loss to explain the discrepancy: "Both results cannot be right," she said.

A lot is at stake. The two companies sell billions of soft drinks a year to Indians, and wage pitched battles -- with Bollywood stars doing the pitching -- for market share.

The center's report prompted outrage, not least because it said that Coke and Pepsi products sold in the US did not contain similar pollutants. Parliament promptly banned the drinks in its cafeteria. Protesters smashed them. Consumers shunned them. Shops here, as across much of the country, report declines in soft drink sales ranging from 10 to 75 percent.

Of course, both companies are symbols of globalization and its perceived threats. Antiwar protesters have criticized them, and both have faced complaints that their plants are depriving local people in Kerala of drinking water.

But there have been no suggestions in India that the center's findings were manipulated for political reasons. Even in Kerala the government has edged toward siding with Coke and Pepsi, discouraging protest against them and saying the jobs they provide are too important to lose.

The tempest has left its mark. After the report exposed a confusing and ultimately porous regulatory framework that did nothing to regulate the quality of water in soft drinks, the health minister, Sushma Swaraj, said the government would consider imposing EU standards on the water in soft drinks.

For two weeks now, a quiet chorus had been murmuring that the problem was not with exploitative multinationals, but with the government that failed to regulate them. Coke and Pepsi, people here say, could not allow pesticides in sodas sold in Europe or the US because those governments would not let them.

Narain said she hoped the debate of the past two weeks would also raise awareness about India's lack of standards for potable water and the absence of a pesticide policy in a country heavily dependent on agriculture.
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