Dharavi revamp in turmoil | Explained

Opposition parties in Maharashtra march to billionaire Gautam Adani's office to protest ₹23,000 crore Dharavi Redevelopment Project, raising suspicion of government favouring Adani.

The story so far: On December 16, wielding flags and banners bearing slogans like “Remove Adani, Save Dharavi”, thousands of protesters led by Opposition parties in Maharashtra marched towards billionaire Gautam Adani’s Mumbai office to express their dissent against the ₹23,000 crore Dharavi Redevelopment Project.

Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum cluster, and the third largest in the world, is home to nearly 58,000 families who migrated to India’s financial capital from across the subcontinent over decades. It stands on a 300-hectare slice of prime land in the heart of the city overlooking the Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC), India’s premium business district.

For almost two decades, the Maharashtra government has been struggling to find a ‘perfect’ bidder, who can take up the challenge of rebuilding a ‘city within a city’ by relocating all the slum-dwellers and their businesses till the redevelopment is finished.

In 1999, the BJP-Sena government first proposed to redevelop Dharavi. Later in 2004, the Congress government led by the late Vilasrao Deshmukh formed the Dharavi Redevelopment Authority under the Slum Redevelopment Authority (SRA) intending to make Mumbai, a slum-free city.

However, the project never got off the ground due to various reasons. According to SRA, 48.35% of Mumbai’s population lives in slums which occupy about 24% of the city’s area.

Over several years, global tenders were floated in 2007, 2009, 2011, 2016, 2018 and 2022. The number of applicants varied significantly, ranging from 101 in 2007 to none in some instances.

Finally, in November of last year, Adani Properties Private Limited successfully secured the 259-hectare redevelopment project through competitive bidding. The conglomerate quoted ₹5,069 crore for the project, while the DLF Group submitted a bid of ₹2,025 crore.