When India Kicked Out Coca-Cola

In 1977, the Janata Party government passed the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA), which required foreign companies to dilute their Indian holdings to 40% and localise operations. For Coca-Cola, one clause was unacceptable: sharing its concentrate formula with an Indian partner. Coke chose to shut down and walk out of one of the world's largest consumer markets.

That exit created a vacuum overnight — a country of 600 million people with a cola habit and no cola. The government tried to fill it itself with '77', a state-backed soft drink that nobody wanted. The private sector moved faster. Parle's Thums Up, launched within months, took the aggressive, bolder-tasting position. Campa Cola, made by the Pure Drinks Group — the very bottler that had brought Coke to India in 1950 — took the mainstream one.

For 16 years India drank Indian cola. Thums Up alone built roughly 60% market share. Then in 1991 liberalisation opened the doors again, and Coca-Cola came back — not by out-marketing Thums Up, but by buying Parle's soft-drink brands outright in 1993 for around $60 million. It acquired its competition rather than fight it, and Campa Cola faded into near-extinction.

The story didn't end there. In 2022 Reliance bought Campa Cola for about ₹22 crore and relaunched it at ₹10 a bottle, using its retail distribution to force a price war Coke and Pepsi have no easy answer to.