Mohammad Shakib lives with his wife and infant son, his parents and two brothers in two cramped rooms in the garbage-filled Mumbai slum of Dharavi.
But the 32-year-old fruit trader is frustrated by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s plans to transform the area into a “world-class” district. Shakib said the scheme would result in the eviction of his family and the loss of his livelihood. “There is only one person who will benefit,” he added.
Shakib’s anger reflects growing concern over Adani’s redevelopment plan in Dharavi, which is expected to displace 700,000 of the estimated 1 million people encroaching on one of the world’s most densely populated areas.
Adani, a powerful tycoon widely believed to have close ties to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, won a contract in 2022 to redevelop the slum, spread over about 600 acres, in the western Located on prime real estate in the congested financial capital of India in the state of Maharashtra.
But Dharavi’s future has become a political flashpoint ahead of state elections this week. Opposition parties seeking to wrest control of Maharashtra from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition have vowed to scrap Adani’s redevelopment contract, which they allege was wrongly awarded.
“This government handed over Dharavi to Adani,” Rahul Gandhi, India’s most prominent opposition leader, told a rally last week. Gandhi has accused Modi of enriching cronies like Adani, whose business interests have grown alongside the prime minister’s ambitious nation-building plans.
“They got airports, ports, roads, and now they are getting Dharavi,” Gandhi said.
Adani has denied benefiting from government favoritism, and supporters of the project say it could become a global model for slum rehabilitation if it goes ahead successfully.
Dharavi was the “most complex” part of a broader overhaul of Mumbai’s strained infrastructure, said a person familiar with the government’s reform plans, which he estimated would take seven years or more. will take and will cost Adani at least $4 billion.
“If a guy like Adani can’t do it, I don’t think anyone in the same model can,” the person said.
An immigrant settlement on the fringes of colonial Bombay in the late 1800s, the area has been engulfed by Mumbai’s explosive growth. Today it is just a stone’s throw from the Bandra Kurla Complex, a modern business district with banks, diplomatic missions and glittering arts and convention centers owned by Asia’s richest businessman Mukesh Ambani.
But Mumbai’s reinvention has hardly touched Dharavi, the iconic setting of the 2008 hit film. Slumdog Millionaire.
Bureaucratic and political inertia, as well as resident resistance, have for decades stymied efforts to redevelop the area, a maze of brick and corrugated iron shacks interspersed with small workshops where workers recycle plastic. or labor to produce pottery or leather products.
In 2022, a BJP-led political coalition took control of the Maharashtra government and issued a new tender to rebuild Dharavi after the previous administration canceled an earlier reconstruction agreement.
Adani’s group, which also operates Mumbai’s airport and distributes electricity to the city, won the tender with an offer of $619 million, 2.5 times the next highest bid. The group has an 80 percent stake in the project, with the state holding the rest.
Seclink Technologies, a Dubai-based consortium that initially won the canceled 2018 tender, has challenged the new contract, alleging in the Bombay High Court that the process violated the bidders’ net worth requirements. “Unlawfully” favored Adani by expanding and restricting consortium members.
The Maharashtra government has said that no contract was agreed with Seclink, that a fresh tender was ordered because the financial and economic situation had changed due to factors including the coronavirus pandemic, and that the consortium had not been excluded. was done
“It’s a form of match-fixing,” said Raju Korde, a lawyer who grew up in a slum and is a founding member of the Save Dharavi movement. Was the plan to rehabilitate and rebuild Dharavi or to make Adani more prosperous?
Adani Group and state authorities have denied any wrongdoing. The party and the Maharashtra Slum Rehabilitation Authority did not respond to requests for comment.
Adani, who worked as a young man in Mumbai’s diamond trade in the late 1970s, wrote last year that he was “moved by the industrious chaos I saw in the streets of Dharavi” and “the survival “Community’s Struggle”
“When this opportunity came to renew Dharavi, I grabbed it with both hands,” he said, promising to provide “residents” with gas, water, electricity, sanitation, recreational facilities and a “world-class hospital”. Wrote.
A person close to Adani said the tycoon saw Dharavi as an old project. “It’s not going to make us much money,” the person said. “[The area] Packed tighter than a can of sardines. . . The challenge is incredible.”
But the redevelopment master plan has not yet been made public and uncertainty is growing among Dharavi residents.
The 2022 tender states that only households able to prove residency prior to 2000 will be re-housing free of charge in a 350 sq ft apartment in the area.
Many residents with documents proving their residence before 2000 are keen to fulfill the promise of more extensive new housing in the Adani area.
“The development is good,” said Sheikh Shaheen Bano, a 53-year-old widow who depends on her son’s wages as a leather worker and wants to stay in Dharavi. “It’s centrally located. . . . all my relatives are here.
For the majority who face displacement like Mohammed Shakib, the Maharashtra government recently approved the acquisition of nearly 400 acres of land on a salt pan and garbage dump in the northeastern suburbs of Mumbai. Vinod Shetty, a human rights lawyer, called the area “unlivable”.
The scheme is to “wipe the slate clean” in a valuable area near the BKC business district and then “hand it over to someone who is close to the government”, Shetty said.
Adani’s survey to verify residents’ residency “has met with a lot of hostility,” said a person close to the group, which also accused some of forging documents to try to show they were there. Lived before 2000.
Many in Mumbai are deeply suspicious of Adani’s intentions, including Sheikh Mubinuddin, a businessman who grew up in Dharavi and owns several shops there.
“He will disqualify the people and the land will be resold to Azad Bazaar in Mumbai,” Mubinuddin said.
