Press Contact:
Pranay Somayajula, Hindus for Human Rights Organizing and Advocacy Director
pranay@hindusforhumanrights.org
March 19, 2025 — In response to Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s recently-announced collaboration with the Mayo Clinic to establish two ‘Adani Health City’ medical research facilities in Ahmedabad and Mumbai, India, Hindus for Human Rights led more than 30 civil society organizations from around the world in issuing the following statement:
As civil society organizations working on human rights, environmental protection, and other key issues of global justice, we are deeply concerned about the news that the Mayo Clinic—widely recognized as one of the most advanced healthcare systems in the world—is reportedly partnering with the Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, whose enterprises have been implicated in numerous corruption scandals, environmental disasters, and human rights violations in India and elsewhere around the world. Such a partnership, forged without adequate public transparency or accountability, directly contravenes the Mayo Clinic’s values of sustainability and social responsibility, and we call on Mayo leadership to reconsider this ill-advised collaboration.
On February 10, 2025, Gautam Adani announced on X (formerly Twitter) that he was “proud to launch Adani Health City in partnership with Mayo Clinic, pioneering world-class medical research, affordable healthcare & education.” Though Adani’s initial post offered few details about the specifics of the partnership, subsequent media coverage indicates that Adani is working with Mayo Clinic Global Consulting to establish two not-for-profit hospital campuses, focused on medical research and affordable health services, in the Indian cities of Ahmedabad and Mumbai as part of a 600 billion-rupee ($690 million) charitable pledge that Adani made two years ago. In an email to the Minnesota Star Tribune, a Mayo Clinic spokesperson stated that Mayo’s engagement with Adani “is not a joint venture or a partnership,” but rather is “strictly advisory.” To date, however, Mayo has not issued any statement or provided any additional clarification on the specific scope and nature of its collaboration with Adani, nor has Mayo offered meaningful transparency on the process by which this engagement was agreed upon—particularly given the blatant contradictions between Adani’s atrocious track record and Mayo’s own stated values of ecological sustainability, institutional social responsibility, and responsible environmental stewardship.
Adani-affiliated mining operations and fossil-fuel infrastructure projects, the contracts for which are often obtained as a result of Adani’s shady dealings with Indian government authorities, have devastated local ecosystems and violently displaced vulnerable communities across India. Among the most notorious of these initiatives is the Adani Group’s massive coal mining project in central India’s Hasdeo forest, which threatens the lands and livelihoods of the forest’s 20,000 Adivasi (Indigenous) inhabitants, as well as the Godda power station project in Jharkhand state, which has led to illegal land grabs and brutal repression against local communities who have tried to defend their lands against theft by Adani’s corporate interests. Outside of India, Adani mining projects in countries like Australia have threatened severe ecological harms to sacred Indigenous sites and delicate ecosystems like the Great Barrier Reef. Moreover, Adani and his businesses have been credibly accused of corrupt business practices, including a 2023 report by Hindenburg Research accusing the Adani Group of “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud” and a 2024 indictment of Adani under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by the U.S. Department of Justice for his role in an alleged $250 million bribery scheme.
This harmful track record speaks for itself, and we are deeply concerned by Adani’s use of charitable initiatives like Adani Health City to provide cover for his many controversies. Even if Mayo’s engagement with Adani is in fact limited to a “strictly advisory” role, the fact that Adani himself is publicly touting this collaboration as a deeper and more meaningful partnership reflects the same deceptive and misleading practices that he has long employed in the business world, and it is incumbent upon the Mayo Clinic to correct the record.
With this in mind, we call on Mayo Clinic leadership to:
-
Issue a public statement clarifying the specific nature of this collaboration and the process by which it was agreed upon;
- Publicize guidelines for the application of Mayo’s ethical and sustainability principles to global consulting partnerships;
-
Withdraw from the Adani Health City project; and
- Commit to no longer collaborating with Gautam Adani or any Adani-linked enterprises or initiatives in the future.
The statement, along with a complete list of signatories, can be read in its entirety here.
