Brahkshavashu is not a word you’d find in a dictionary, but apparently, it’s an effective motto for life and business. That’s what Mukesh Mehta, project management consultant for the Rs 9,300 crore Dharavi Redevelopment Project, claims. The idea behind the tongue-twister word: “I think like a Brahmin, fight like a Kshatriya, ensure that there are tangible gains in my business ideas like those of a Vaishya, and I slave on my work like a Shudra.”

“I’ve used this well,” says Mehta, 57, the man who first presented the idea of a swanky township replacing Asia’s most notorious slum sprawl in Mumbai, almost 10 years ago. On Friday, global tendering began for the much-delayed project, now part of the financial capital’s ambitious makeover.

Having trained as an architect from Pratt Institute, New York, Mehta returned to an India that was going through the Emergency. Private construction activity had come to a standstill, so he picked the next best option, entering his father’s steel business and going from “990th among 1,000 traders” to among the top manufacturers.

He remembers Diwali puja that year, when he told his brother Harendra, six years his senior, that in six months they should increase production from 200 tonnes a month to 2,000 tonnes. “He looked at me like I’d landed from Mars.” Mehta got that look repeatedly through the course of his various proposals: when he suggested Dharavi’s makeover, a slum-free Mumbai, a slum-free Nagpur, a slum-free Hyderabad, among others. In any case, the Mehta brothers not only became the top steel traders in the country, selling steel and advising the big guns of steel manufacturing, but also went on to buy a series of steel mills, starting with a sick unit and adding five others in 45 months. “The joke was that the Mehta brothers produced one factory every nine months.”

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