How CSE found pesticides in cola

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New Delhi: The pesti-cola controversy is unlikely to lose its fizz for some time to come. After an environmental group - the Centre for Science and Environment - exposed that soft drinks manufactured by cola giants PepsiCo and Coca Cola contained pesticides in amounts higher than normal, there has been a constant tug of war between the cola giants and the NGO.

On Tuesday, the Union Health Ministry added yet another twist to the tale by calling the CSE report inconclusive. However, on Wednesday Health Minister Ambumani Ramadoss said that the Government has not given clean chit to the cola giants either.

While the Health Ministry's dilly-dallying is drawing criticism, CNN-IBN finds out how CSE conducted the tests and found the pesticides in the first place.

Officials from CSE went and bought 57 500-ml cola bottles from across the country. They tehn took three samples of each bottle were taken put them through a process that removed the water, sugar and caffeine, leaving behind everything else that makes a cola.

These highly-concentrated samples were then in injected gas chromatographs – a modern chemist’s favourite detector tool that can determine the constituents of a mixture.

In the readings given by the chromatograph, each spike represents a compound, in this case, pesticides.

The question, therefore, is whether these readings can be inaccurate.

"Once you inject the samples it is an automated process and the result comes out through the computer attached to it. So, there is no question of anything going wrong in the results,” Associate Director, Chandra Bhushan says.

It doesn't really matter which part of the world these tests are carried out, or who's carrying them out as the process remains pretty much the same.

The only thing that can change are the sizes of the samples. CSE says their tests are comprehensive and their findings will stand up to scientific scrutiny and that it's time for the Government to wake up to the reality.

"We ourselves had tested the samples and groundwater. We are very clear that pesticides are coming from water,” CSE Director Sunita Narain says.

The Government says CSE has got it all wrong, but for the NGO has an answer for all the Government's allegations.

So the question is why doesn't the Government enact regulations that will address not just colas but also substances like potable water?