-The Hindu Dehra Dun: Navdanya, the People's Science Institute and the Friends of Doon - all local environment protection groups - have urged Uttarakhand Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna to immediately cancel the memorandum of understanding signed with Coca-Cola that plans to set up a unit in Vikas Nagar area near here. "We will never allow Coca-Cola to set up its plant in the ecologically sensitive Doon Valley as the plant, besides stealing...

-The Hindu   Locals allege Coca-Cola is to blame for the rising water crisis in the area Varanasi: Holding it responsible for the aggravation of water crisis in the area, village councils here have opposed Coca-Cola's plans of expanding its existing bottling plant at Mehdiganj, 20 km from here, and called on the government to stop the company's current Groundwater extraction. Fifteen panchayats or village councils here have asked the Central Ground Water Authority...

-The Hindu     As the borewells go deeper in Maharashtra, there have been worrying instances of ‘paleo-historic storages' being breached "Only two of them work," says Badri Kharat of his borewells in Roshangaon. That's hard - when you've sunk 36 of them spending millions of rupees, as he has. Kharat, a big landowner and local political personage, has been generous to his neighbours in this village of Jalna district. He pipes in drinking...

-The Telegraph JALNA AND AHMEDNAGAR: Sakharam Misal is frank. Water, he says, is big business. In Jalna district, which has run out of water, the man in his late 50s is among the most sought after. He runs a water tanker business and sells water to the thirsty millions. Misal's cellphone keeps ringing with desperate calls for water. His tankers are booked in advance and the waiting list stretches over a week. Drought,...

The ongoing droughts and water crises in Maharashtra and Gujarat point to the multiple conflicts the beleaguered and scarce resource of water is likely to spark in the coming years. India is today the world’s largest consumer of Groundwater, but it is clear that how we extract, harvest, distribute and manage our most precious resource cannot proceed along usual lines. The unsustainable over-extraction is heralding a fall in the water-table and...