More than 15 years after the beginning of the fight for shrinking groundwater supplies between Coca-Cola and farmers in India, the situation continues to worsen with no solution.

"We have to dig ever deeper wells," Savitri Rai, 60, told Bloomberg outside her mud house in Mehadiganj village in Uttar Pradesh state.

The beverage giant's bottling plant, which lies about half a mile away from Rai's home, had to recently halt an expansion because it could not get the permits from the Indian government to extract more water.

And while the corporation battles the farmers for rights over the water, some of the attention and pressure has turned to India's new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, to regulate the use of the not-so-easily renewable resource.

Water dries up during the hot summer months in India from wells, and many farmers rely on the groundwater and the monsoon rains, resulting in a dependency on nature rather than a well-organized infrastructure.

The World Bank has said that the growing aquifer overexploitation by farms, businesses and cities imperils India's development goals for industries ranging from mining to brewing, Bloomberg reported.

In 2008, PBS reported on the issue from another Coca-Cola plant in the state of Rajasthan. At the time, PBS reported the beverage company arrived in 1999 and had 49 plants in India by 2008.

The plant in Rajasthan reportedly used about 900,000 liters of water in a year, about a third of it for the soft drinks and the rest to clean bottles and machinery, PBS reported.

The water was drawn from wells but also aquifers shared with neighboring farms.

In 2008 a farmer told PBS that the water level used to descend by about one foot per year, but since Coca-Cola arrived it has increased to 10 feet per year.

The change is significant in a country where agriculture is an important industry, Bloomberg reports.

India draws 230 cubic kilometers of groundwater per year, more than a quarter of the global total, of which about 70 percent is used for agriculture, World Bank data shows, according to Bloomberg.

The decrease in groundwater means that many farmers have to try to drill deeper into the wells, but some are too poor to be able to do so, Bloomberg reports.

Coca-Cola did not comment on the issue, but in a letter to the government it complained about how the delay in an approval for further extraction has caused financial losses for the company, and halted a $24 million expansion.