From: DailySouthAsian
Date: March 02,
2008
Invitation
Right
to Water National Conference
and
Protest Against Coca-Cola
Mehdiganj,
UP, India
March
28-30, 2008
Access to
water is a fundamental human right. Water is sacred, and without
water, life is not sustainable.
Over one
billion people around the world still lack access to clean drinking
water.
Communities
across the world, particularly the poor and the vulnerable,
are finding it increasingly difficult to access water to meet their
basic needs.
Even though
the UN Millennium Development Goals in 2000 has set the
year 2015 as halving the proportion of people without sustainable
access to safe drinking water, we seem far from achieving such an
important goal.
With the real
threat of climate change already impacting communities
around the world, realizing the fundamental human right to water is
getting increasingly difficult. We already see more and more
communities across India and the world struggling to meet their basic
water needs.
We are
witnessing a trend that is rapidly taking away water rights from
communities and placing it in the hands of those that place a
commercial value on water – the water profiteers. Water, a
fundamental human right, is now being traded in markets across the
world, and those who can afford it have it, and those that cannot, lose
out.
We reject the
commercialization of water. Human rights cannot be
traded and markets cannot and must not decide who has access to
water.
Yet, the
Indian government is allowing multinational companies, both
Indian and foreign, to enter the water business. Predictably, the
result is that more and more communities are left without water, while
private companies make profit from selling and trading water.
A significant
example of such egregious behavior comes from the
Coca-Cola company, which has continued to extract millions of liters of
water everyday in India while communities who reside around its
bottling plants are left thirsting for water.
Companies in
India and around the world have also denied people access
to water by negatively impacting the quality of water. The
Coca-Cola
company has regularly polluted the scarce remaining water resources
around its bottling plants in India, further denying people their
fundamental human right.
Communities in
India and globally are fighting back against the wave of
privatization and asserting the primary rights of communities over
water.
In a
resounding victory for grassroots campaigns around the world, the
people of Plachimada in Kerala have shut down Coca-Cola's bottling
plant since March 2004. The communities of Kala Dera in Rajasthan
and
Mehdiganj in Uttar Pradesh are getting close to shutting down the
bottling plants in their communities. And the survivors of the
Bhopal
gas disaster of 1984 are currently marching over 800 kms to Delhi to
demand justice and safe drinking water.
We demand
community centered solutions to the water crises and insist that
communities must have primary rights over water.
The community
of Mehdiganj and Coca-Cola affected communities in India
are working with communities, elected officials, local, state and
national government officials, people's movements, non-governmental
organizations and international groups to challenge the eroding right
to water and asserting the fundamental human right to water.
Join us for an
conference on the right to water in Mehdiganj on March
28 and 29 followed by a march and demonstration against the Coca-Cola
bottling plant on March 30.
Program
details will follow shortly.
For more
information, please contact:
Nandlal
Master, Lok Samiti, Mehdiganj, India
+91 94153
00520 E: napm_up@yahoo.com
Sandeep
Pandey, National Alliance of Peoples Movements, India
+91 522
2347365 E: ashaashram@yahoo.com
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