"Every drop counts" - India's mantra for water conservation has multinationals banking on these three words to promote the culture of water management, especially those in the realm of food and beverages.
Coca-Cola India recently collaborated with UN-HABITAT to improve community access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation in West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh. Coca-Cola is known to have one of the most extensive water harvesting programmes.
Of the total water utilised by industry in India, the beverage industry uses approximately 0.04 per cent, not a small figure considering the country houses 18 per cent of the world's population and only 4 per cent of the world's fresh water.
Companies like Nestle, Coca-Cola and Pepsi conduct water management programmes to focus on better utilisation and reusage of wastewater as well as to provide the community they work in with clean drinking water and water conservation education.
Nestle started a project at its factory in Moga in 1999 aimed at providing clean drinking water in schools and educating children on the importance of water hygiene and conservation.
The Rs 1 crore (Rs 10 million) programme benefited almost 27,000 students. More than 2,000 village members worked in sync with PepsiCo's community water projects spread across four villages in Kerala from 2003 till 2006.
Both Nestle and PepsiCo involved village members to contribute a percentage of the cost of the project or contribute through physical work.
"This encourages them to take care of it and sustain the project," Dr Raj Singh, executive VP, corporate affairs, Nestle India, explains. PepsiCo intends to implement similar community initiatives in three more villages and construct a bore well in a Kerala school where students experience severe water scarcity.
Coca Cola's MoU with UN-HABITAT promises safe drinking water not in rural areas alone but even among the urban poor in West Bengal. In their attempt to conserve and re-use water, these companies have been actively recording their water usage statistics.
"Our programmes have brought down water usage in the snack and beverage plants to one third of 2001, saving 1.5 billion litres of water in 2006," says a PepsiCo spokesperson.
Between 1997 and 2007, Nestle witnessed a fall of 30 per cent in the water usage for every tonne of product produced. Wastewater discharge reduced by 30 per cent and commendably, PepsiCo's wastewater discharge has come down by 48 per cent in just a year starting 2005 to 2006.
Since 2000, Coca-Cola India has improved water use efficiency by almost 30 per cent in its operations in India and invested over Rs 10 crore (Rs 100 million) in the last four years in the physical work in the community.
In line with a bill passed in all states in the country (except Punjab), initiating water harvesting and making it mandatory in possible areas, Nestle plans to start rainwater harvesting at its plants this year.
The Coca-Cola-UN-HABITAT MoU aims at setting up urban and rural rainwater harvesting systems at 15 locations in Madhya Pradesh. The company already has 270 such projects across 17 states.
"We are working with ICRISAT in Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu to create sustainable livelihood through water sheds," divulges Pravin Aggarwal, head of citizenship, Coca-Cola India.
"We are also evaluating and researching opportunities to achieve water balance through agricultural interventions like the direct seeding methodology, which has shown the potential to generate water savings of 40 per cent (1,000 kl/hectare)," reveals the PepsiCo spokesperson.
The collective effort by this industry towards conserving water and providing safe drinking water might just inch India closer towards achieving the UN's Millennium Development Goals.
