In 2018, a policy change removed the requirement for prior experience in airport operations.
Soon after, one corporate group won all six airports up for bid.
In 2023, restrictions on solar plants near India's border with Pakistan were gradually eased.
Soon after, that same group secured the largest piece of land in that project
A proposed anti-monopoly safeguard in India's ambitious grain-storage programme was dropped.
And once again, that same group emerged as the biggest beneficiary.
One instance could be coincidence.
Two might be good luck.
But when the same pattern appears across sectors, it becomes hard to ignore.
The group at the centre of this–if you haven't guessed already–is Adani.
Governments have offered their own justifications for these decisions,
and the Adani Group has consistently denied receiving any preferential treatment.
I will give you four examples in this episodes
And then we can ask
Are we witnessing a remarkable run of business success?
Or are we seeing how political power shapes markets, policy, and opportunity for one group in Modi's India?
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In May 2026, journalist Astha Savyasachi published an investigation for Newslaundry. It uncovered an unusual story about the Food Corporation of India (FCI). The story looked at how the FCI was modernising the way grain is stored across the country.
Instead of relying on traditional warehouses, FCI planned to build a nationwide network of modern steel silos linked by rail and road.
The project was worth thousands of crores and would help determine who controls a critical part of India's food logistics infrastructure for decades.
According to the investigation, FCI officials initially wanted safeguards to prevent monopoly.
But NITI Aayog and the Department of Economic Affairs opposed the anti-monopoly provision, and it was eventually removed.
In the years that followed, Adani Agri Logistics emerged as one of the programme's largest beneficiaries.
In 2022, they won 70 of these 80 contracts. That’s 87.5 percent of all Phase 1 silos.
Projects worth Rs 9,713 crore
FCI has rejected allegations of favouritism and said the bidding process was transparent.
On its own, this might have looked like a routine policy dispute.
What made the story noteworthy was that it echoed a pattern that critics of the Modi government have pointed to for years.
It fits a broader trend: state decisions which end up strengthening the position of the same conglomerate.
One of the clearest examples came in India's airport sector.
The Airport Auctions
In 2018 and 2019, the Modi government launched one of the largest airport privatisation drives in India's history.
But before the auctions key bidding rules were changed.
Until then, companies were required to have prior experience in airport management. That requirement was removed.
Another change allowed a single bidder to win multiple airports instead of limiting how many could be awarded to one company.
The government argued that these changes would broaden participation and make the auctions more competitive.
The outcome was striking. Adani Enterprises, which had no prior experience operating airports, emerged as the winner of all six airports on offer: Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Mangaluru, Jaipur, Guwahati and Thiruvananthapuram.
The auctions themselves were conducted through a formal competitive bidding process.
But the sequence of events?
The rules were changed, the field was opened to new entrants, and the company that benefited most was Adani.
Khavda and the Border-Land Question
The Khavda renewable-energy project sits in Gujarat's Kutch district, close to the India–Pakistan border.
Because of their strategic location, large areas near the border have historically been subject to tighter restrictions on construction and commercial activity.
The Guardian, The News Minute, and Scroll reported that the Gujarat government had allotted 23,000 hectares of land in Kutch to the Solar Energy Corporation of India. The land was allocated as part of a large renewable energy park.
But the land was close to India’s border with Pakistan. And defence restrictions meant that SECI could build wind turbines on the land, not solar panels.
In April 2023, the defence ministry agreed to relax the restrictions. And though SECI could have gone ahead with the work, three months later, the firm surrendered the land to the Adani Group.
The Adani Group now holds 445 sq km of land in the park, the largest allocation of land in the solar park.
Bangladesh, Godda and the Export Rules
The Godda power project in Jharkhand was unusual from the outset.
It was a ₹14,800-crore, coal-fired power plant built primarily to supply electricity to Bangladesh rather than India.
Most of India's power-sector regulations had been designed around generating electricity for domestic consumption, not exporting large volumes of power to a neighbouring country.
That created a number of regulatory and policy challenges.
According to reporting by The Indian Express, a series of government decisions over several years helped clear those hurdles and make the project viable.
First, the government changed the rules for importing and exporting electricity. The Central Electricity Authority then proposed measures to make it easier for electricity to flow across borders.
In October 2025, the Modi government approved a proposal from Adani Power Limited (APL). This allowed APL to connect its Godda power plant to the Indian electricity grid.
The government also gave APL powers under the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885. These powers are usually given to telegraph authorities. They allow the company to place the infrastructure needed for transmission lines, such as poles and cables.
Here too, a familiar pattern was pointed out: regulatory obstacles were gradually removed, the project moved forward, and one of the principal beneficiaries was the Adani Group.
Approvals, Timelines and Regulatory Advantage
Not every advantage comes from subsidies, tax breaks or changes in bidding rules.
Sometimes it comes from how quickly a project moves through the approval process.
And that’s exactly what was reported by Article 14 on a series of Adani Green Energy projects in Maharashtra's Western Ghats.
Article 14 reported that the environment ministry granted preliminary approvals for three pumped-storage hydropower projects. These approvals were given between late 2022 and early 2023.
The three projects were worth about ₹19,000 crore. They were located in ecologically sensitive areas of the Western Ghats.
The projects received key early approvals from the government. This happened even though environmental experts had raised concerns about their potential impact.
Here’s the catch.
The timing stood out.
The approvals came soon after Adani signed a ₹60,000-crore investment agreement with the Maharashtra government, helping advance projects that formed part of that broader expansion plan.
Now, perhaps each of these policy changes can be explained on their own.
Airport rules were revised to increase competition.
Renewable energy policy was redesigned to speed up the green transition.
Border-area restrictions were relaxed to enable strategic infrastructure.
Environmental approval processes were streamlined to encourage faster investment.
Etc etc
But when you zoom out, a pattern starts to appear.
Across sectors, the same corporate group often emerges as the biggest beneficiaries of these shifts. Adani Group is of course the most striking example.
This is where political economists raise a warning.
When the same firms repeatedly gain the most from regulatory change, the risk is something called regulatory capture.
That is when the boundary between public policy and private power becomes blurred—so much that regulation starts to reflect the priorities of dominant corporations more than public interest.
The consequences go beyond economics.
Competition weakens when smaller firms feel the system is tilted.
Public trust erodes when the same names keep winning big contracts and approvals.
Democratic accountability can suffer in such situations. This happens when government policy appears to respond more to the interests of powerful corporations than to the needs of the wider public.
That sits at the center of the debate over India and the rise of Adani.
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