Mohammad Shakib lives in two cramped rooms in the rubbish-strewn Mumbai slum of Dharavi along with his wife and newborn son, his parents and two brothers.
But the 32-year-old fruit merchant is dismayed at plans by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani to transform the area into a “world-class” district. The scheme would result in his family’s expulsion and loss of his livelihood, Shakib said. “There’s only one person who will benefit,” he added.
Shakib’s anger reflects growing concern in Dharavi over Adani’s redevelopment plan, which is expected to displace an estimated 700,000 of the roughly 1mn people crammed into what is one of the world’s most densely populated areas.
Adani, a powerful tycoon widely thought to have close ties to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, won a contract in 2022 to remake the roughly 600-acre slum, which sits on prime real estate in India’s overcrowded financial capital in the western state of Maharashtra.
But Dharavi’s future has become a political flashpoint ahead of state elections this week. Opposition parties trying to wrest back control of Maharashtra from an alliance led by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party 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 such as Adani, whose business interests have expanded in step with 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 favouritism, and supporters of the project say that if it proceeds successfully it can become a global model for slum redevelopment.
Dharavi was the “most complex” part of a wider overhaul of Mumbai’s strained infrastructure, said one person familiar with the government plans for the revamp, which they estimated would take seven years or more and cost Adani at least $4bn.
“If a man like Adani cannot do it, then I don’t think anyone can in the same model,” the person said.
A migrant settlement on the fringes of colonial Bombay in the late 1800s, the area has been enveloped by Mumbai’s explosive growth. Today it is just a stone’s throw from the Bandra Kurla Complex, a modern business district home to banks, diplomatic missions and gleaming arts and convention centres owned by Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s wealthiest businessman.
But Mumbai’s reinvention has hardly touched Dharavi, the famous setting for the 2008 hit film Slumdog Millionaire.
Resistance from residents along with bureaucratic and political inertia has for decades stymied efforts to redevelop the area, a maze of brick and corrugated-iron shacks mixed with small workshops where workers toil to recycle plastics or churn out pottery or leather products.
In 2022, a BJP-led political alliance won control of Maharashtra’s government and issued a new tender to remodel Dharavi after an earlier redevelopment deal was cancelled by the previous administration.
Adani’s conglomerate, which also runs Mumbai’s airport and distributes electricity to the city, won the tender with a $619mn offer, more than 2.5 times the next highest bid. The group has an 80 per cent stake in the project, with the remainder held by the state.
Seclink Technologies, a Dubai-based consortium that initially won the cancelled 2018 tender, has challenged the new contract, alleging in the High Court of Bombay that the process “unlawfully” favoured Adani by raising bidders’ net worth requirements and limiting consortium members.
The Maharashtra government has said no contract had been agreed with Seclink, that a new tender was ordered because the financial and economic situation had been changed by factors including the coronavirus pandemic, and that the consortium was not excluded.
“It’s a type of match fixing,” said Raju Korde, a lawyer who grew up in the slum and is a founding member of the Save Dharavi Movement. “Was this project for the rehabilitation and redevelopment of Dharavi or was it for making Adani more prosperous?”
Adani Group and the state authorities have denied any wrongdoing. The conglomerate and Maharashtra’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority did not respond to requests for comment.
Adani, who worked as a teenager in Mumbai’s diamond trade in the late 1970s, wrote last year that he “was mesmerised by the industrious chaos that I saw in Dharavi’s alleys” and was inspired by “the community’s struggle for survival”.
“When this opportunity to renew Dharavi came calling, I seized it with both hands,” he wrote, promising to provide “eligible residents” with gas, water, electricity, sanitation, recreational facilities and a “world-class hospital”.
A person close to Adani said the tycoon saw Dharavi as a legacy project. “It’s not going to make us a lot of money,” the person said. “[The area] is more tightly packed than a can of sardines . . . the challenge is incredible.”
But the redevelopment master plan has yet to be made public and uncertainty is mounting among Dharavi residents.
The 2022 tender states that only households able to prove residency pre-2000 will be rehoused for free in a 350 sq ft apartment in the area.
Many residents with documents proving their pre-2000 residence are keen to take up Adani’s promise of more spacious new housing in the area.
“Development is good,” said Sheikh Shahin Banu, a 53-year-old widow who depends on her son’s wage as a leather worker and wants to stay on in Dharavi. “It’s centrally located . . . all of my relatives are here.”
For the majority who like Mohammad Shakib face relocation, Maharashtra’s government recently approved the acquisition of nearly 400 acres of land on a salt pan and garbage dump in Mumbai’s north-eastern suburbs, an area that Vinod Shetty, a human rights lawyer, said was “not habitable”.
The scheme was in effect “wiping the slate clean” in a valuable area near the BKC business district and then “handing it over to somebody who’s close to the government”, Shetty said.
Adani’s surveys to verify residents’ residency have “met with a lot of hostility”, said the person close to the group, who also accused some people of falsifying documents to try to show they lived there before 2000.
Many in Mumbai are deeply sceptical about Adani’s intentions, including Shaikh Mobinuddin, a businessman who grew up in Dharavi and owns a number of shops there.
“He will make people ineligible and the land will be resold to the Mumbai free market,” Mobinuddin said.
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