Article review
Himika Sarkar(20113178)
It is the critical analysis of the article, Thirst for profit written by P. Sainath
which was published on April 21, 2006 to highlight the important issues related
to water. He wanted to make us aware of the corporate highjack of water.
The author here is trying to point out how the regular drinking water is being
replaced by Coca cola because of the business interests of the giant
companies. It is seen that in many parts of India now, people are preferring to
buy the small Coca-Cola bottles of Rs. 5 because they have no other choice if
they really did not want to consume the contaminated drinking water. It is
because of the vast impact of coke on irrigation and drinking, several revolts in
different villages like Plachimada in Kerala, Kaladera in Rajasthan etc has come
up. The author has cited out instances like selling of the Malapuzha river and
dam in Kerala. Thus, he drives our attention to the way selling and ownership
of dams by private parties are occurring and that is how he indirectly talks
about privatization. Farmers in Andhra Pradesh have already thrown away the
World Bank’s James Wolfensohn because of the fact that he was trying to
establish and decide who use water and who does not. In Plachimada in Kerala,
the panchayat revoked the licence of the Coke plant because of the pollution
caused by the toxic nature of sludge spewed out by it. The author emphasises
on the fact that how the poor people in slums and villagers have been denied
and deprived of the access to their daily basic necessity of water which is
actually wasted to provide entertainment in water parks for the rich, lavished
upper class people as cited in Bazargaon , Vidarbha village in Maharashtra,
resulting in numerous suicides by the farmers affected due to the shortage of
water. Here people are unable to meet their daily needs and the Coke
company is using 283 billion litres of water worldwide free of charge as
estimated in 2004. The author sarcastically refers to these soft drinks’
manufactures as if they are sponsoring to the World Water Forum. Thus, the
real questions related to this grave issue stay hidden always. The business is
basically playing with the minds of the common people to earn more profit by
making a bottle of Coke be sold at Rs 5 whereas a bottle of drinking water
being sold at Rs10. So, due to the cost efficiency, people instead of buying the
necessity for survival is buying coke which in turn is leading to many health
hazards. Studies have come up with the fact that about 118 million households
