The untold story of Gautam Adani’s Dharavi tryst

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Editor's note: Dharavi, a 2.5 sq. km area in Mumbai that houses 80,000-90,000 families and countless small scale units, is back in the headlines. The sprawling slum, which has captured the imagination of filmgoers over the years as the underbelly of India’s financial capital whose residents alternate between hope and despair, could soon be razed to the ground. The reason: The Ahmedabad-based Adani group, which has grown by leaps and bounds in the last six years in terms of expanding into highly regulated industries such as airports and ports, has won the very tender it lost three-and-a-half years ago. The tender to redevelop Dharavi. As the winner of the tender, the Adani group will, as per the rules, have to rehabilitate close to a million slum-dwellers in high-rise apartments, but can profit from the land that’s left over. And that is a lot. Back of the envelope calculations show that after providing for existing residents, it should have over 35 million sq. feet of saleable area, or half the total that it would get under the tender. The Dharavi project would put …