The Centre for Science and Environment on Thursday turned the tables on the cola majors by saying that it was contemplating legal action against them for attacking its credibility and still not coming out with relevant data to support their claims against 12 soft drink brands containing pesticides.

The defence came in response to the newspaper advertisements published by both the companies on Thursday claiming that reports giving a clean chit to their products were available on the net.

Also Read Soft drinks, hard truths

"Since CSE's report was released on August 5, soft drink manufacturers have not hesitated to call CSE by every possible name and to attack its credibility; they have also termed its reports 'baseless', a release issued by CSE said.

"CSE did not respond because it wanted to see the data that the soft drink manufacturers had in their defence. However, today, on examining the data, which PepsiCo and Coca Cola have made public, CSE finds the effort is to continue to convolute, confuse and indeed, take the Indian public for a ride," the release added.

Pepsi on Thursday published a Vimta laboratory report (dated July 6, 2003) for 24 pesticides, tested in six cities of India.

Coke has also released data on tests done by the Netherlands-based Nutrition and Food Research Laboratory (TNO), for 12 different sites in India.

CSE says that Coca-Cola's data pertains to its bottled water product -- Kinley -- which is not the data related to its soft drink products. It is not even data for the plants that manufacture soft drinks, it adds.

A Coca-Cola official, when contacted, said that the company uses the same water for manufacturing its soft drink products as well.

For Pepsi, CSE says that the data relates to its 'Aquafina' plants and the tests have been done for raw water and treated water.

It adds that in two cases, PepsiCo results say that pesticide residues in the source water were less than that found in the treated water.

A Pepsi spokesperson, however, said that even CSE has used the water benchmark in its study since there is no standard for soft drinks all over the world.

On the point of treated water having a higher level of pesticides, the spokesperson said that the low level of incidence of 0.002 deviation is acceptable in testing protocol and is in any case well within the norms.

She added that the variations arrive in experienced laboratories and CSE should realise that their limited experience and data is highly suspect.