Mumbai Being in Dharavi, where ACORN has worked for almost twenty years, and meeting with our members one day, and then the ACORN Women’s Waste Collective on another, the concerns about the impending redevelopment plan for this huge community of almost one-million residents and workplaces was palpable. The Adani Group somehow won this controversial and much challenged contract and after starts and stops, it is spinning towards implementation.
The Adani Group and its founder are more than controversial outside of India, and perhaps even criminal based on the charges from the US Justice Department and Securities & Exchange Commission over more than $250-million in bribes connected to its more than one-billion-dollar solar construction project for the Modi government. Despite the fact that Trump has “paused” enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Adani charges are still standing. Although in some vote of appreciation for his hopes of relief, Adani has reportedly committed to invest $15-billion in the United States. Many sovereign funds have withdrawn Adani investments and countries as varied as Kenya and Sri Lanka have cancelled contracts with Adani over these concerns. ACORN’s recent report details many of these problems.
In India, you wouldn’t know there were any clouds around Adani, outside of Dharavi itself. One day’s edition in the Times of India has several full-pages of Adani puffery on some form of charity he was promoting. Covering the actual development in Dharavi, problems are papered over in the Times of India. In an update on the project the headline simply said, “Dharavi: 1.4L units to be resettled, 35-40% of land mass to be used.” A lakh is 100,000, so the claim would be 140,000 units. The claim that only as much as 40% of the 590 acres of Dharavi leaves the bulk of the land for Adani to do pretty much as he chooses in building luxury towers, malls, and more over the coming more than 15-years of his concession. As part of the project, he has also been given another 1500-acres elsewhere in Mumbai for development as well as 45 acres in railway and dairy land, while he is still seeking 540 acres in the salt-pan to place residents that Adani is blocking from Dharavi that would be housed in 300 to 350-square feet units offered for rent or sale.
It’s hard to really tell. The completed survey only numbers 53,000 units, though 84,000 units were numbered, essentially privileging Dharavi landlords for resettlement in Dharavi and the upper stories of tenants to wherever. It’s hard to tell, because all of this is based on press releases and company spin with the master plan promised perhaps in the coming month. There won’t be much transparency or accountability then either. The CEO of the Dharavi Development Project, the Adani official on the ground, has said, “The master plan is based on the development plan. No objections/suggestions will be invited once the plan is unveiled. However, when detailed layouts are prepared, if there are changes, objections/suggestions will be invited.”
Residents are displaced if they cannot prove habitation in Dharavi more than a decade ago, which is part of what ACORN has been helping people verify. The Adani Group has not revealed how these determinations will be made finally or how appeals will be handled. As many as 300,000 may be displaced, if not more. Planners and architects working with ACORN and the coalition have designed a plan that would house all of the existing residents back in Dharavi, if Adani used the other land it has acquired for its commercial interests.
No matter the puffery and spin, the fight for residents to have the right to return home to Dharavi is far from over.