Yet, if she could change the past, the “bubbly” lady from Chennai would have loved to take head-on firebrand green activist Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), when the pesticide-in-cola controversy first broke out in India in 2003.

In an interview with US-based magazine BusinessWeek, Nooyi blamed herself “for letting things out of hand,” when the CSE raked up the issue of pesticides in soft drinks. “One thing I should have done was to appear in India three years ago and say: ‘Cut it out. These products are the safest in the world, bar none, and your tests are wrong’,” the magazine quoted the India-born Pepsi chief as saying.

Admitting that the company’s marketing strategy also made matters worse, she said: “Combine the public seeing the mercenary side of us, along with the fact that this was an American company.” In the run up to the controversy, in December 2002, the Supreme Court had pulled up PepsiCo for damaging the environment by painting its advertisement on rocks in the Himalayas, which was followed by allegations of depleting ground water by its various bottling units.

She, however, added that the public didn’t see “the other things we were doing” and implied that the company was a victim of its own image. “If we get attention, it’s not because of the water we use. It is because of what we represent,” Nooyi said. “What we don’t want is for people to think that industry is taking out of the ground God-given natural resources and depleting that community of its livelihood or requirements for existence,” she added.

Nooyi said PepsiCo needed to look at the bigger picture, besides focusing on its water conservation programmes executed across various operations for the betterment of all. “We have to invest, too, in educating communities in how to farm better, collect water and then work with industry to retrofit plants and recycle,” she said.