The Adani Group’s proposed demolition and redevelopment of the huge shantytown called Dharavi has left residents fearful that they will lose their jobs. Although conditions are cramped and primitive, Dharavi provides incomes for hundreds of thousands of people in workshops and pocket-sized factories. Many residents are boycotting a survey being carried out as part of the redevelopment. Here, Ayaskant Das talks to several residents of Mumbai's massive shantytown in their homes and workplaces about their hopes and fears.
- Name of the project: Dharavi Redevelopment Project
- Location: Dharavi, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
- Project proponent: Navbharat Mega Developers Private Limited (an Adani-owned company)
- Total cost of project: approx. Rs 20,000 crore (USD$ 3 billion)
- Population to be resettled: approx. 0.8 to 1 million
- Approximate area of Dharavi: approximately 239 hectares
- Present Status: Construction to commence
Mumbai: At noon on a sunny winter’s day, Junaid Khan leads me through a labyrinth of narrow, dark alleys to his house in Dharavi, one of the largest shantytowns in the world, which the Adani Group plans to develop into a glitzy urban hub. The shantytown, popularised in the Oscar-winning movie 'Slumdog Millionaire', is in the heart of Mumbai, India’s financial capital.
The alleys are so narrow that in places only one person at a time can fit through. On either side are the damp walls of buildings with accommodation units stacked on top of each other like empty matchboxes. Even at high noon, hardly any daylight penetrates these alleys. One must tread carefully beneath overhanging electricity wires, which pose the danger of electrocution. I lose track of Junaid while pausing to click a photograph of a tangle of wires. He quickly reappears – the 35-year-old man knows the layout of the township like the back of his hand – from another alley.
Junaid’s house, which he calls his family home, is extremely small – 8 feet by 12 feet. This tiny space accommodates Junaid, his sister and his mother. They have spent their entire lives inhabiting this cramped space.
They tell me they are lucky to be a small family. Much bigger families are cramped into similar-sized dwelling units. A single LED bulb lights the room. There is a small ceiling fan. There are no beds, tables or any other items of furniture. Right next to the door is a place to wash utensils and clothes. The family cooks food in one of the corners. The walls are bare and there is no window or ventilation. Like virtually all the other dwellings in Dharavi, there is no washroom. The inhabitants use community toilets to answer the call of nature and for their daily ablutions.
Amina Khan, Junaid’s mother (60), sits on a plastic mat spread out in the centre of the room.
‘We have spent our entire lives in this township in these conditions,’ Amina tells me. ‘Now, we are being sold a dream that we will be allotted bigger flats with modern amenities totally free of cost. We want development, for sure, but not away from Dharavi. We want to be resettled and rehabilitated in the place we call home.’
Junaid’s family home is in a section of Dharavi that is known as Naurang Society. Around 500 dwelling units comprise this neighbourhood, which has more than 2000 inhabitants. These people have so far not allowed officials to undertake surveys of their homes.
‘No one goes to bed hungry in Dharavi,’ says Amina. ‘There is enough work in the small factories and workshops here. Our previous generations lived, worked and died here.
‘We have not allowed the surveys because we want written assurances that we will not be uprooted. We want the blueprint of the development plan to be shared with us for the work to take place.’
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The exact population of Dharavi is as mysterious as the township. Thousands arrive in Dharavi each day in search of livelihoods; many continue living here for years. Thousands are also continuously leaving the township in search of better opportunities elsewhere. The total votes polled in Dharavi in Maharashtra’s state elections on 20 November 2024 was 131,304 which was pegged at approximately 50 per cent of registered voters. It is estimated that the township has a population between 400,000 and 1,000,000 people.
Tens of thousands of small manufacturing units in Dharavi employ a staggering number of people. They make kitchen essentials, spare parts for motor vehicles, bread, woodwork, glass items, noodles, biscuits, incense sticks, soap, nuts, bolts, house décor and office stationery. They segregate electronic waste and recycle paper and cardboard. By the very nature of these operations, they are effectively cottage industries. But these hundreds of thousands of workers, most of them migrants, have no clarity about what will happen to their jobs when the Adani Group redevelops the township.
An iron ladder takes me up to a cramped tailoring unit on the first floor of a building. Around half a dozen workers are busy stitching denim bags to be supplied to a veterinary medicine manufacturer for use as packaging. Another couple of workers are busy piling the finished stock in heaps.
‘We have entered into a proper rent agreement with the owner of this space and can provide all documents to prove our legal entitlement to run this workshop at this very location,’ the tailoring team leader, Daresh Rai (40), tells me. ‘But we are not aware what provisions the Dharavi redevelopment plan contains in terms of resettlement of small industries like ours.
‘We can carry out our manufacturing activities anywhere, but our supply chain will be broken if we are thrown out of Dharavi.’
This uncertainty is echoed in Banwari Compound, another section of Dharavi, where workers recycle materials and segregate electronic waste. Officials are yet to survey this section of the township.
‘There are more than 350 recycling units in the Banwari Compound alone,’ said Ijaz Khan (32), a third-generation owner of a cardboard-recycling business. ‘These units employ thousands of workers. Imagine the scale of joblessness if the units are shut down for the redevelopment of the township.’
A ‘special purpose vehicle’ (SPV), basically a company in which Adani Group owns an 80% stake, has been awarded the tender to redevelop Dharavi at a cost of nearly US $3 billion. The Maharashtra government holds the other 20% in the SPV which was renamed Navbharat Mega Developers Private Ltd (NMDPL) recently. In January 2025, the Maharashtra government granted permission for the first phase of construction work to begin, even as criticisms of the project’s lack of transparency ring loud in Dharavi.
‘Shops lined across the road have been surveyed, but we have been left out,’ Rafaqat Hussain (48), who has been running a tailoring shop in the township’s Gopinath Colony for the past 20 years, tells me. ‘No blueprint has been shared. We have been verbally assured that shops will be allotted against shops and houses against houses but there are no written assurances.
‘We have decided not to relocate. We want to be resettled in Dharavi.’
The proposed survey work is a mammoth task given the nature and extent of buildings and population in Dharavi. It commenced in March 2024. In November 2024, the Adani Group released a statement saying that survey work for 25,000 tenements had been completed while 60,000 dwellings had been numbered.
In Garibnagar, another section of Dharavi, this correspondent saw cryptic codes stencilled on the dwelling units. Multiple tenements stacked on top of each other in very small spaces were allotted separate numbers. Local people have been given to believe that all units that have been numbered will be replaced by dwelling units measuring 350 square feet (about 33 square metres).
‘Not all dwelling units are tiny – there are larger dwelling units too,’ a local inhabitant, Mohammed Sultan Sheikh (67), explained. ‘Once the entire area is flattened, it is possible to evenly allot 350-square-feet houses to one and all.
‘Replacement dwelling units in Dharavi are being promised only for the ground-floor owners of each tenement. Those living in rentals will be provided alternate rental housing in areas like Mulund and Bhandup [salt pans in Mumbai] where the project proponent is developing high-rise residential towers.’
A community toilet across the road from the cluster of tenements in Garibnagar was numbered, as was a kiosk selling cigarettes and mouth fresheners. They were numbered in the same sequence and system as nearby dwellings, giving rise to a suspicion that the Adani company might be attempting to artificially inflate the number of dwellings to be demolished.
At a modest third-floor office in the Mumbai’s Mahim area, a short distance from Dharavi, lawyer-turned-activist Rajendra Korde, a vocal critic of the project, says the project proponent is deliberately enumerating more tenements in Dharavi to get more units for sale under the Maharashtra government’s 1.33 rehab-resale ratio.
‘In slum redevelopment projects, in general, those living above the ground floor are considered ineligible for compensatory housing,’ Korde, who belongs to the Peasants and Workers Party of India, told this correspondent. ‘However, in the case of Dharavi’s redevelopment, the Maharashtra government has introduced a provision whereby those living above the ground floors will be provided alternate housing on a rent-purchase basis.
‘Against each housing unit provided for rent in the Dharavi Redevelopment Project, the developer will be allowed to sell 1.33 housing units in the open market.’
Earlier, the Maharashtra government had said that only those who owned houses on the ground floor prior to 1 January 2000 would be deemed eligible for rehabilitation within Dharavi. However, just before the 2024 assembly elections were announced, the coalition government of Maharashtra, headed by chief minister Eknath Shinde, announced rehabilitation even for those living above ground floors. The Shinde government said that these households will be provided rental housing in new flats within Mumbai – but outside Dharavi – on a rent-purchase basis. The households would be given the option to either pay a nominal rent for 25 years or make a lump-sum payment at any point of time to acquire complete ownership of their respective flats.
On 4 October 2024, the Maharashtra government issued a resolution wherein, Korde alleged, an incentive FSI (Floor Space Index) of 1.33 for saleable component in exchange for constructing the rental housing was provided as a deal sweetener for the project proponent.
‘Not surprisingly, therefore, the project proponent is trying to identify as many households living on rent in Dharavi as possible,’ said Korde.
AdaniWatch has earlier reported that construction of housing units in high-rise residential towers proposed by the Adani Group in Mumbai’s salt pans has commenced, with prices beginning at over US $20,000, even as those facing the prospect of being displaced are yet to obtain any clarity about the redevelopment plan.
Reportedly, the first phase of construction of Dharavi will commence on a small parcel of 2.58 hectares which has been taken over from Indian Railways.
The late inclusion of Indian Railways land within the scope of the Dharavi project led to the cancellation of an earlier tender. A consortium led by a Seychelles-incorporated firm, SecLink Technologies Corporation, had emerged as the highest bidder. SecLink had beaten the Adani Group in the tender that was floated in November 2018 by the state government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), headed by Devendra Fadnavis. The BJP is the political party to which Indian prime minister Narendra Modi belongs; Modi and Gautam Adani are said to be close.
In March 2019, the Fadnavis government wrote to SecLink that it was the preferred bidder for the Dharavi redevelopment project. However, in November 2019, the same government entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Indian Railways for inclusion of an additional 18.21 hectares of railway land within the redevelopment project. After a political coalition opposed to the BJP (including the Congress) assumed power in Maharashtra in November 2019, this tender was cancelled on the grounds that inclusion of railway land within the scope of the project constituted ‘material change in tender conditions’.
Fresh bids were invited for the project in October 2022, this time by another coalition government which was supported by the BJP and headed by chief minister Eknath Shinde of the regional political party Shiv Sena. In November 2022, the Adani Group was declared winner of the Dharavi Redevelopment Project, having mounted the highest bid of Rs 5069 crore (US $588 million). Korde alleged that the criteria in the new tender had been framed to suit the Adani Group.
SecLink filed a petition in the Bombay High Court, challenging the Maharashtra government’s decision to cancel the tender issued in November 2018. It alleged that, as per the terms of the first tender, a consortium of up to eight members could participate in the bid process. It argued that this was ‘fair and commercially viable given the huge magnitude of the project’.
However, in the new tender of October 2022, it was stipulated that ‘the number of consortium members should not exceed two’. SecLink further argued that, in the first tender, it was provided that the members of the consortium could collectively satisfy the financial eligibility for the project. In the new tender, a condition was laid out that the lead member and the consortium members should ‘separately satisfy the financial eligibility’ criteria.
In a judgment delivered on 20 December 2024, the high court found that allegations of bid rigging had not been proven. It found that, as three bidders had entered the fray for the project when the new tender was issued, out of which at least two were found to be technically qualified for the project, there were no attempts at favouring a particular bidder at the cost of others.
High court Chief Justice Amit Borkar wrote in his judgment: ‘As far as the submissions made on behalf of the petitioner [SecLink] that tender conditions were tailor-made to suit a particular tenderer, we may observe that in response to the fresh tender three bidders had participated out of which two bids were found to be technically qualified. Meaning thereby, at least two bidders fulfilled the technical conditions and therefore, since there were more than two bidders in the field who participated out of which two technically qualified, it cannot be said that the tender conditions were tailor-made so as to suit only a particular bidder.’
Notably, in the fresh tender, the Maharashtra government had reduced the base price for the project from Rs 3150 crore to Rs 1600 crore to attract more bids. As many as eight companies had attended the pre-bid meeting. The judgment further states that since SecLink had not participated in the new tender and had also not participated in the pre-bid meeting, it ‘cannot be permitted to challenge the terms and conditions of the tender’.
Apart from the Adani Group, the two other companies that bid for the project following the new tender were Delhi-based housing construction company DLF Group and another company called Shree Naman Group, which has its office in the Bandra Kurla Complex, a wealthy district near Dharavi.
In fading daylight, I wound my way through Kumbharwada, another section of the shantytown. Kumbharwada owes its name to the massive earthenware industry in the enclave. Third- and fourth-generation migrant potters from the western Indian state of Gujarat, to which prime minister Modi and Adani belong, have brought relative prosperity to the potters’ enclave through decades of relentless enterprise and hard work. Earthenware manufactured in Kumbharwada is exported to various countries.
An elderly Gujarati woman retailing earthenware alongside the main road in Kumbharwada tells me that traditional livelihoods of potters in the enclave will be wiped off if the redevelopment proceeds.
‘Already we are facing opposition from foreign consulates, five-star hotels and multinational companies in Bandra Kurla over allegations of air pollution caused in the process of baking earthenware. It makes no difference to them that we have been here for generations while the Bandra Kurla Complex is very new. When high-rise towers of glass and chrome rise over the flattened shanties of Dharavi, will we be allowed any longer to carry out pottery manufacturing in the vicinity?’ she asks.
It has been officially declared that the potter’s enclave will be obliterated as part of the redevelopment project.
‘In such a situation, in which our traditional livelihood is no longer sustainable, we will have no option but to surrender our houses and workshops for the project,’ she signs off, refusing to be photographed or to divulge her name.
‘It is all about glitz and glamour. The tenements in Dharavi will ultimately be engulfed and assimilated into the wealthy Bandra Kurla district.’
