Thirsting for more
The ever-swelling numbers of urban consumers who are hitting the (soft-drink) bottle and the increasing ability of the beverage manufacturers to penetrate the rural market have ensured that sales and revenues head north. According to market sources, the soft-drink industry was estimated at 6.5 billion bottles in the year 2000 and volumes have been increasing at 14-15 per cent per annum since then.
An international soft drink association put the market size of the soft-drink sector in India at about 1.4 billion litres in 1998. Producing this quantity would require a staggering 5.6 billion litres of water. Most of this is extracted from groundwater resources.
Assuming that the per capita consumption of water is 30 litres per day, the water used annually by the soft-drink industry is enough to meet the needs of more then 5 lakh people (say, for the district of Bolangir in Orissa which is chronically drought hit) for a year. With such an astronomical and ever rising demand and absence of any regulations, the future seems bleak for the management of groundwater resources in the country.
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