Adani's Dharavi ambitions

The project ups the stakes on implementation

Days after the Maharashtra government issued a resolution to enable Adani Properties to start redeveloping Dharavi, for which it had won the bid in November last year, group Chairman Gautam Adani weighed in with an optimistic note recording his “huge personal connect” with one of Asia’s largest slums. This connection, he explained, caused him to bid 2.5 times higher than the next bidder for the project. Mr Adani noted that once the project to rehabilitate 650,000 inhabitants and develop the 259-acre slum was completed within the stipulated timeline, he was confident that former world heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson, who had visited the slum in 2018, would not recognise it. He was also confident that Danny Boyle, director of the Oscar award-winning Slumdog Millionaire would discover that the new-look Dharavi was producing millionaires without the slumdog prefix. These are confident words about a project that has been singularly controversial, and the latest attempt appears no less challenging.

Dharavi’s rehabilitation was attempted first in 2008 and then in 2016 but did not elicit an interest from property developers. The latest award faces a high court challenge by Mumbai-based realtors who claimed to have won a 2019 tender against Adani Group. The tender was altered to include the development of railway land and was subsequently scrapped by the Uddhav Thackeray government in 2020. A fresh tender was issued last year, and that Adani Group won. The sweetener in this deal is the prospect of developing high-end commercial and residential real estate close to the Bandra-Kurla Complex, which has emerged as a tony, commercial district of Mumbai. Achieving this requires first relocating Dharavi’s inhabitants from the slum-dwellings to 400-square foot tenements — the bid document promises to provide them water, power, piped gas, and a sewage-disposal system. This exercise has to be achieved without disrupting the area’s vibrant tiny-, small-, and medium-scale economic activities involving pottery, leatherwork, tailoring, and so on, including unique collaborative enterprises. There are reportedly 58,000 commercial and family units located here. The other looming problem is defining eligible beneficiaries. Not all residents would be eligible for this relocation bounty; exclusion could lead to law and order problems.

Mr Adani suggests that solutions to these problems are at hand. First, he said, the tender document has stipulated that ineligible tenants too be included in rehabilitation plans. This sounds reassuring, but it is unclear how ineligible tenancy will be established on the ground. Second, he plans to address the livelihood issue through a combination of training centres for upskilling, common facilities for product- and service-based entrepreneurship models, R&D and data centres, help desks, and much more. Mr Adani added that the project would invest in creating organised and systemic marketplaces in line with the Open Network for Digital Commerce. Such impressive declarations deploy all the key words in vogue and press the right buttons. They also up the stakes in terms of project implementation, more so when Mumbai’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority has not managed to leverage 28 years of experience with any degree of success. To be sure, Mr Adani has a track record of good project execution across the group. But Dharavi could take that challenge to a wholly new level.