Coca-Cola and Its No. 1 Anti-Fan

Into every shareholders meeting, some rabble-rousers must fall. Sometimes, its the same one again and again. On Wednesday, for the seventh time in as many years, Amit Srivastava, of the India Resource Center, plans to speak up at a Coca-Cola shareholders meeting in Atlanta to draw attention to what he says is a pattern of water over-use in India.

Mr. Srivastava has been on Coke�s case since at least 2002. This year he�s got some fresh material. In March a government-appointed committee in Kerala recommended that the state claim the equivalent of $48 million in environmental damages from Coca-Cola India. The state government shut down a bottling plant there in 2004 after still-unproven complaints that the facility was using up local groundwater supplies.