Saturday, 23 November 2024
Saturday, 23 November 2024
Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray on Thursday unveiled his party’s manifesto for the Maharashtra assembly polls and said that they will scrap the Dharavi redevelopment project because it will have ramifications on Mumbai.
So what is the Dharavi redevelopment plan? And what is the controversy surrounding it?
Dharavi, established in 1884 to accommodate fishermen, later housed the city’s burgeoning migrant workers. It is one of Asia’s largest slums located in Mumbai. Per various estimates, around 8-10 lakh people live in Dharavi.
A report estimates that Dharavi has 5,000 businesses and 15,000 single-room factories, generating potential revenue of between $700 million and $1 billion annually. Dharavi, located in prime central Mumbai, spans over 200 acres.
Dharavi is to India what Rio de Janiero’s favelas are to Brazil; a place where crime and business exist together and an area where celebrities throng. The movie Slumdog Millionaire, which won the Oscar for the Best Picture, made Dharavi more famous.
When the former world heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson visited Mumbai in 2020, reporters asked him if he planned to visit Bollywood superstar Salman Khan’s party, which Salman Khan reportedly threw for him. Tyson said, “I am going to the slums. Tell him, I am going to the slums, I am not going to a party.”
Dharavi has special tourism packages like any other religious or historical places in India do.
On November 30, 2022, Adani group won a bid for the Rs 23,000 crore worth Dharavi redevelopment project for Rs 5,070 crore. The group bid more than double of what its nearest competition, the DLF group, bid. DLF group, often said to be the architect of modern day Gurgaon, had bid Rs 2,025 crore.
In 2018, there was another tender for the redevelopment for Dharavi. Adani Group then lost the bidding war to a Dubai-based group. However, the government cancelled that bid.
According to a report in the NDTV Profit, “The plan, comprising resettlement of 6.5 lakh eligible slum-dwellers living in a 2.5 sq km area, is projected to be completed in seven years.” The Adani group will build the homes for the Dharavi residents, per plan. The government departments will allocate these homes to the residents.
“God willing, the likes of Danny Boyle (director of Slumdog Millionaire) will discover that the new Dharavi is producing millionaires without the slumdog prefix.” Gautam Adani wrote on his website.
The Opposition parties have been blasting the BJP ever since the plan rolled out. In December, 2023, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said that the true beneficiary of the project were not the people of Dharavi, but PM’s closest friend, in an apparent dig at Gautam Adani.
In March, 2024 Lok Sabha campaign, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said, “”Dharavi is the real Make in India, it is a manufacturing hub… desh dalal nahi, Dharavi ke log banate hai (the nation is shaped by the people of Dharavi, not by brokers)… Dharavi is your own land but the government is trying to acquire it through dalals.”
“Contrary to the claims of favouritism, the selection was based entirely on merit, with the Adani Group submitting the highest bid in a tender that was open to national and international participants. The tender’s terms and conditions were finalised during the previous Maha Vikas Aghadi government, of which Congress was a part,” the Adani group said to Gandhi.
But the controversy continued during the Lok Sabha when the undercurrent of Opposition narrative was that Mumbai is going into the hands of a Gujarati, and a friend of PM Modi.
Mumbai Congress chief and MP Varsha Gaikwad, who was a MLA from Dharavi, said they will cancel the tender if they come to power, said in an interview to the Frontline on Tuesday.
Rahul Gandhi, a vocal critic of what he calls the Adani-Modi connection, wrote in a commentary for an English daily on Wednesday that match fixing monopoly is harming Indian business. His barb was aimed at the Modi-Adani connection.
On Thursday, Gandhi posted on X: “After my article, many play-fair businesses are telling me that a senior Minister has been calling and forcing them to say good things on social media about PM Modi and the govt’s programs.”
Author Suketu Mehta, whose book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found captures the core of Mumbai once stayed a week in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas for an essay on informal settlements in metropolises. He had said, “The threat to residents here will no longer come from drug traffickers but rather from the real estate market.”
And real estate in Mumbai is worth more than gold and lies at the centre of controversy in Dharavi as the slum goes to vote on November 20.
