Adani and the State
Pattern vs. Proof in India's Infrastructure Push
Adani and the State
Of the five sectors examined, the Western Ghats case is the one where the 'fast-tracked clearance' framing is hardest to sustain. Adani signed a ₹60,000 crore MoU with Maharashtra in June 2022 for pumped-storage hydro expansion in the ecologically sensitive Ghats, received rapid preliminary approvals, and critics alleged it moved through the Expert Appraisal Committee with unusual speed.
The most serious documented red flag is not a final clearance — it is a structural conflict of interest: an adviser with ties to Adani sat on the EAC, the statutory committee responsible for environmental appraisal. That procedural failure anchors the broader regulatory-capture hypothesis.
But the outcome cuts sharply against the fast-tracking narrative. The EAC ultimately rejected — or returned for significant revision — Adani's flagship expansion, and imposed heightened scrutiny on all pumped-storage projects across the Western Ghats, not merely Adani's.
The conflict-of-interest question deserves a full, independent answer. But unlike the airports, Godda, or FCI silo cases — where rule changes definitively produced outcomes benefiting Adani — here the regulatory process appears to have functioned as a brake rather than an accelerant.
Whatever the composition of the committee, its substantive decisions did not produce the clearance that the conflict-of-interest concern might have predicted.
— Western Ghats EAC outcome — rejected Adani's flagship expansion; extra scrutiny imposed across all Ghats pumped-storage projects
A consistent cross-sectoral pattern: safeguards proposed by the government's own technical bodies were overruled at a higher political-administrative level — and Adani emerged as the dominant or sole beneficiary every time. Whether that constitutes proof of regulatory capture, or a series of defensible liberalisation choices a well-capitalised conglomerate was best positioned to exploit, is an interpretive question the primary record does not, by itself, resolve.
— Synthesis — Pattern vs. Proof fact-check
The regulatory capture hypothesis remains exactly what this investigation has found it to be: a pattern with substantial evidentiary support, and a causal claim that is still unproven.
— Pattern vs. Proof — concluding finding