Suspense Crime Sach Ka Dam
The landslide victory of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde) Mahayuti in Maharashtra has given a reprieve to the billionaire Gautam Adani-led group’s $3 billion Dharavi project, under which Mumbai’s slum Dharavi is being redeveloped as a ‘world-class’ district. Opposition party Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena (Uttar Pradesh) had promised to take back all the land given to the Adani Group for redevelopment of Asia’s largest slum and cancel the project completely if it came to power.
It would have been a big setback for Adani.
For Adani, who is facing bribery charges in a US court, the cancellation of his pet Dharavi project would have been a major setback. These worries have now been put to rest, as election results show the BJP and its allies the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party factions led by Eknath Shinde and Ajit Pawar have won more than three-fourths of the 288 seats in the Maharashtra assembly. Adani plans to transform the 620-acre land, about three-fourths the size of New York’s Central Park, into a magnificent urban hub.
7 lakh people will get flats for free
Nearly seven lakh people living in dilapidated shanties with open sewers and shared toilets in the densely populated slums near Mumbai’s international airport are to be given free flats of up to 350 sq ft. The redevelopment issue had become politically heated as the opposition alleged that the group received undue favors from the state government in awarding the contract. The group has denied benefiting from government favoritism. Congress leader and leader of opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly raised the issue of the Dharavi redevelopment project and accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party BJP of ‘enriching cronies like Adani’.
will become a global model
Supporters of the project in the ruling party say the project is set to become a global model for slum redevelopment. Dharavi is home to about 1 million people, but only about 700,000 were deemed eligible. Residents, by definition, must have proof of living in the area before January 1, 2000. The rest will get homes in other areas of the city. The proposal has been opposed by some locals as they want no resident or business owner to be rendered homeless.
