By Neeraj Mishra
The stench was so overpowering that women began vomiting involuntarily. Flies and mosquitoes multiplied at an astonishing rate, turning a 10-kilometre stretch around the plant into what villagers describe as an unliveable zone. Then came the incessant roar of machinery, churning day and night.
For the people of Kokodi village in Kondagaon district, Bastar, it became too much.
About six months ago, villagers finally snapped. Armed with sticks and axes, they attacked the ethanol plant and damaged its machinery and storage drums. Virtually everything inside the facility was wrecked.
Since then, the plant has fallen silent. The flies still gather around the heaps of corn waste, but for the villagers, the silence itself has brought a sense of relief they had not experienced for months.
The Cooperative Department has assessed the damage at around Rs 80 crore, while the district administration is working to persuade the villagers to allow the plant to resume operations.
But the most serious threat may not be the smell, the flies or even the noise. It is something far less visible—and potentially far more difficult to reverse. Water.
Chhattisgarh’s first ethanol plant, established by the cooperative department at Kokodi in June 2023 at a reported cost of Rs 145 crore, was launched with considerable fanfare. With a production capacity of 80,000 litres of ethanol a day, it was projected as a symbol of the state’s push towards bio-fuels and as a new economic opportunity for thousands of maize farmers.
The reality on the ground, villagers say, has been very different.
Kokodi lies barely 10 kilometres from the Kondagaon district headquarters, in a region whose forests, agriculture and communities depend heavily on underground water. According to local farmers, tube wells and freshwater wells began running dry within the first year of the plant’s operation.
The plant, spread over roughly 15 acres, has sunk at least a dozen tube wells to meet its substantial water requirements. Villagers say the water table has since fallen dramatically—from water being available at less than 100 feet to depths approaching 400 feet.
The consequences have reached the fields.
Farmers who once depended on groundwater for cultivation say they can no longer reliably grow a second crop during the winter. At least 100 hectares of agricultural land in and around the village have reportedly been affected. The promise that the plant would create opportunities for some 4,500 corn farmers has, for many villagers, been overshadowed by the loss of the water on which their farms depend.
The arithmetic itself is disturbing. Ethanol production is water-intensive, and the plant’s stated capacity of 80,000 litres a day translates into a potentially enormous demand for water. If the figure of roughly 10 litres of water required for every litre of ethanol is applied, the plant could require around eight lakh litres of water every day.
That is not simply water consumed by an industrial facility. It is groundwater drawn from an aquifer system that has accumulated over generations of rainfall and supports agriculture, vegetation, livestock and human settlements across the region.
Every deep borewell, in such circumstances, becomes more than a piece of industrial infrastructure. It becomes a point of extraction from a shared natural resource.
And that is where the Kokodi controversy acquires significance far beyond one village.
The ethanol plant was conceived as part of a larger national and state push towards alternative fuels, agricultural value addition and reduced dependence on fossil fuels. Ethanol can indeed offer environmental and economic advantages when produced sustainably. But a green fuel cannot be considered genuinely green if the process of producing it leaves the communities around the plant without drinking water or the farmers without irrigation.
The question, therefore, is not whether Chhattisgarh should produce ethanol. It is how, where and at what ecological cost it should do so.
Kokodi is already a warning.
The plant still stands. Its machinery is silent, but its financial obligations have not disappeared. The facility has to service its debt, and the government has an obvious interest in getting a Rs 145-crore investment back into operation. Talks between the administration and villagers are underway.
Yet, the villagers appear adamant that they will not allow the plant to restart unless their concerns are addressed.
For them, this is no longer simply a dispute over an industrial project. It is about the basic ingredients of ordinary life: sleep, food, clean water, productive fields and the ability to live without unbearable odour, insects and industrial noise.
No government investment can easily compensate a community for the loss of those things.
The Kokodi experience should also prompt a much wider examination of Chhattisgarh’s emerging ethanol landscape. Plants are planned or coming up in Kawardha, Bemetara and elsewhere. Before more groundwater is committed to industrial production, there needs to be a rigorous assessment of aquifers, cumulative water demand, waste disposal, groundwater contamination, agricultural impact and the carrying capacity of each location.
The state’s ambition to turn its agricultural wealth into industrial wealth is understandable. But Bastar’s natural wealth cannot be treated as an inexhaustible reservoir.
The danger is that by the time falling water tables become visible, it may already be too late.
The lesson from Kokodi is stark: a plant may be shut down and machinery replaced, but an aquifer depleted over centuries cannot be rebuilt in a government financial year.
Chhattisgarh may aspire to become an ethanol powerhouse. It must first ensure that its villages do not become the price of that ambition.
—The writer is a senior journalist
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