The Dashing Developer India Needs

From airports and ports to power grids and knowledge systems, the tycoon’s rise tells the story of an India determined to build at scale despite relentless political and geopolitical resistance.

On Christmas Day, as the year wound down, India quietly crossed an infrastructural Rubicon. The long-awaited Navi Mumbai International Airport, delayed for years by litigation, land politics and environmental activism, finally opened its runways. For Mumbai, it promised relief from chronic congestion. But for India, it marked something more consequential: the arrival of a private operator capable of executing civil aviation projects at a continental scale.

The airport’s developer and operator, the Adani Group, has made no secret of its ambitions. By 2030 it plans to invest roughly $15 billion to expand passenger-handling capacity across its airport network to nearly 200 million travellers a year. That figure alone would make it one of the largest airport operators anywhere outside China. In India’s context, it amounts to a declaration: aviation will no longer be a bottleneck to growth.

Proxy Target

At the centre of this expansion stands Gautam Adani, unmistakably the country’s most consequential industrialist and its most contested one. To supporters, he is the embodiment of execution in an economy long paralysed by delay. To critics, especially those hostile to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political project, he has become a proxy target – a symbol of capitalism fused inconveniently with national ambition.

Abroad, he is increasingly viewed as something else altogether - a symbol of India’s refusal to accept externally imposed limits on its rise.

The airport strategy reflects that confidence. Navi Mumbai is only the most visible node in a rapidly expanding network. Parallel upgrades are under way in Jaipur, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Thiruvananthapuram and Guwahati. Collectively, these airports will anchor India’s aviation growth as passenger traffic rises towards 300 million annually by the end of the decade. By positioning itself to handle roughly two-thirds of that volume, the Adani Group is re-shaping India’s aviation story.

Nowhere is that approach clearer than in Guwahati. In December, the prime minister inaugurated the new terminal at Lokpriya Gopinath Bordoloi International Airport less than a year after its design was unveiled. Operations are scheduled to begin by early 2026. Designed to handle over 13 million passengers annually by 2032, the terminal named ‘Bamboo Orchids’ uses 140 metric tonnes of locally sourced bamboo and incorporates motifs drawn from Assam’s ecology and culture.

The terminal moved from design unveiling to inauguration in under twelve months - a timeline that would be considered aggressive even in East Asia. For a region long accustomed to delayed connectivity and symbolic promises, the airport has become a rare example of infrastructure arriving before expectations collapse.

Guwahati already ranks as India’s tenth-busiest airport. With the new terminal, it is being positioned as the Northeast’s primary connector to the national and global economy and an essential plank of India’s Act East policy.

Such projects explain why Adani’s rise has provoked unease well beyond India’s borders. Infrastructure is power made visible. Control ports and airports and one begins to shape trade routes, supply chains and strategic choices. It is no coincidence that as Adani’s footprint has expanded, so too has the intensity of scrutiny from Western regulators, activists and short-sellers.

The most dramatic of those confrontations came with the Hindenburg episode. Launched with maximal publicity, the short-seller’s allegations sought to portray the group as a house of cards propped up by accounting tricks and political favour. The campaign inflicted sharp market damage but it did not survive contact with regulatory reality. In September, India’s securities regulator dismissed the allegations in full, finding no fraud, no unfair trade practices and no regulatory violations on part of the Adani group.

Markets responded accordingly as Adani stocks rebounded sharply. Not long after, Hindenburg announced it was winding up operations. What had been framed as a moral crusade against Indian capitalism ended as a footnote.

Surviving Pressure

The Hindenburg episode also exposed a deeper asymmetry which is that while a New York-based short seller could wipe billions off an Indian company’s market value in hours, the burden of proof rested almost entirely on the accused. That the group survived the assault without asset sales, state bailouts or governance concessions has quietly recalibrated perceptions of Indian corporate resilience.

Yet the attacks did not end there. In the United States, frustration with India’s geopolitical autonomy has begun to bleed openly into rhetoric about its businessmen. As Washington chafes at New Delhi’s refusal to abandon discounted Russian oil or offer sweeping trade concessions, senior figures have echoed the language of India’s opposition. References to “politically connected energy titans” have entered official discourse in an extraordinary intrusion into another country’s domestic political debates.

The logic is obvious. As India’s rise cannot be checked directly, it must be slowed indirectly. Target the companies that build its ports, power plants and airports. Apply legal pressure extraterritorially. Encourage friendly governments to reconsider contracts. Kenya’s cancellation of Adani-linked infrastructure projects, citing information from ‘partner nations’ offered a glimpse of this playbook in action.

The fact that such tremendous pressure has failed to derail the group speaks to its underlying strength. Consider Bangladesh. Amid a severe financial crisis and political upheaval, the country fell behind on payments for power supplied by Adani. Electricity flows were reduced, then restored as payments resumed. By mid-2025, Dhaka had cleared nearly $1.5 billion in dues. Contracts, in the end, mattered more than politics.

The same pragmatism underpins Adani’s broader aviation ambitions. Airports are only one layer. In November, Adani Defence Systems acquired India’s largest independent flight training and simulation company, adding pilot training and simulators to its portfolio. The goal is a fully integrated aviation ecosystem spanning civil and defence MRO, general aviation and training in an approach that mirrors how serious aviation powers think about capability.

What distinguishes Adani from earlier Indian tycoons is not merely scale. He well understands that ports feed logistics, logistics feed industry, industry demands energy, and energy and trade require airports. This forms the rationale for his group to capture a massive pie in each of these sectors. It is also why the group attracts ideological hostility. After all, in India’s liberal ecosystem, builders have long been viewed with suspicion.

But Adani has responded not by retreating, but by widening the frame of his activities. Last month, he announced a Rs.100 crore founding contribution to the ‘Bharat Knowledge Graph’ - a digital platform aimed at preserving India’s civilisational knowledge for the AI era. The initiative, developed with the Indian Knowledge Systems division of the education ministry, seeks to integrate ancient disciplines of linguistics, astronomy, governance, healthcare with modern data science.

Critics will dismiss this as symbolism. They are wrong. Civilisations that fail to encode their knowledge for new technological eras risk erasure. Adani’s intervention recognises that infrastructure is not only physical. Data, culture and memory matter too.

Today, Gautam Adani stands at an unusual intersection of capital, politics and geopolitics. He is neither neutral nor apologetic about it. His airports, ports and power plants are assertions of India’s capacity to build fast, think big and absorb pressure without capitulation.

India’s political opposition, chiefly the Congress led by Rahul Gandhi, has sought to caricature Adani by alleging that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is attached to Adani’s hip. What this allegation conveniently ignores is that every governing era presided over by the Congress had its preferred tycoons, from the Wadias and Tatas under Congress dominance to a rotating cast of licence-era industrialists who prospered through proximity rather than any performance.

The difference between those industrialists and Adani is that the latter’s projects are gargantuan, visible and auditable, leaving little room for the quiet rent-seeking that once flourished behind closed doors. That openness has made him easier to attack, but also harder to dismiss.

It also explains why Gautam Adani has become such a tempting target. And that is precisely why he matters. Because in a country still learning how to grow without permission, builders like Adani are not aberrations but necessities.