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Last
year, the soft drink industries and mineral water industries of India
found themselves in hell with attacks from all sorts of agencies,
institutions, government and also the common people.
 Eventually they were
banned in some states when pesticides and other chemicals were found in
larger quantity than the accepted limit. The longest struggles of
kerala, the 1588-day Plachimada agitations by the tribal against the
large-scale ground water exploitation by a soft drink giant that lead to
acute drinking water shortage in the village got a wide range of
international supporters. The agitation proved to be a spark that fired
a row of agitations all around the country.
But the ban of the well-known soft drink brands in many states led to
mushrooming of many cottage soft drink production units filling up the
space which the giants had earlier occupied.
These small-scale units have no standard bottling systems or
state-of-art productions plants which are very essential to purify the
water which is already polluted due to the uncontrolled use of
fertilizers. Hence, these drinks obviously contain many dangerous
chemicals as there is no system which monitors the process of production
which neutralizes the effect of the ban.
Not only
soft drinks but also many ‘edible’ ‘confectioneries’ and countless
number of bottled and packaged food items which you now find in the
local market will turn out be ‘not-edible, poisonous’ items if put
through proper laboratory examinations. However, there is no hope of a
‘plachimada’ against these small devils because the ‘plachimada’ against
Pepsi became a success partly because of the universal interest it got
due to the size of the company.
These small scale industries are not going to stand a long agitation,
thus depriving the agitation of international admiration.
To add spice to all these problems, global giants are once again taking
the center stage by large scale campaigning using many widely admired
personalities such as Sharukh Khan, Amitab Bachan, Amir Khan, and many
more. These campaigns are surely going to make some sort of positive
response though the scale of the response can’t be predicted easily.
These facts compel one to rethink before considering the agitations a
success.
From the above-described situation it is clear that banning a product
alone will
not make sure that it will not be sold or bought, what is needed is a
well functioning monitoring system which supervises the production.
It is the disease which must be treated not the symptoms!
-
Girish
Raghavan |
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