The Chennai-based poet and activist Meena Kandasamy has won the Mayilamma Award named after the `Plachimada Heroine’ who had campaigned against the Coca-Cola company at Kerala’s Plachimada village.

Meena wins the award for her social activism and efforts for the empowerment of women. The Rs. 15,555-award, set up by the Mayillamma Foundation, will be presented in March at a ceremony at Palakkad.

“I am surprised by the award, but I am happy,” Meena told Business Line . “Mayilamma is a symbol of people’s resistance to multinational companies’ exploitation.” Meena, who writes poetry in English and translates important Tamil works into English, said she was not just a poet. She said she was a writer, campaigner for social justice and feminist. “You cannot put a single label on me as you would on a heart surgeon who only treats the heart.” Mayilamma, a tribeswoman from the Plachimada village on the Kerala-Tamil Nadu border, who died in 2007, has for long been an icon of the people’s fight against the mighty cola company.

Its subsidiary, the Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Private Ltd, had built a huge bottling plant at Plachimada.

A former worker at the plant, Mayilamma found that the company had caused the drying up of 64 open wells and caused the contamination of the ground water in the area. When her Eravalar tribal community had to go without drinking water for long periods, she decided to strike back. She founded the Plachimada Anti-Coca Cola Struggle Committee that campaigned for several years and sat in dharna near the plant for more than three years to get the factory shut down.

Several people’s movements, NGOs and a few political outfits backed her cause. The campaign held the multinational company responsible for the village’s water shortage. Finally, in 2004, the government ordered the plant closed.

Once the plant was closed, the campaign focused on securing compensation for the victims of the water pollution caused by the Coca-Cola plant. But, she could not see her dream come true, before she died, aged 67, in 2007.

Mayilamma, who emerged as a symbol of the marginalised people’s resistance to corporate hegemony, was honoured with many awards, including Outlook magazine’s Speak Out Award. A government-appointed committee in 2010 assessed the damage caused by the plant and slapped a Rs. 218-crore fine on it.

The company challenged this in court. In February 2011, the Kerala Assembly unanimously passed a Plachimada Compensation Tribunal Bill that would facilitate setting up of a tribunal which could award the compensation to the Plachimada victims. The Bill was sent to the President of India for consent, but the Central Government has been sitting on it for nearly three years even as many of the people who had struggled hard for their water rights and compensation have died.

> basheer.kpm@thehindu.co.in

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