Regional Dialogue on Building Sense: Towards Sustainable Buildings and Habitat

Pune, November 20, 2015:

Centre for Science Environment (CSE) has expressed deep concern over the growing obsession among the state and city governments across the country to offer sops of extra and free built up area and fiscal incentives to push the developers to opt for green rating of buildings. State governments are doing this without setting up independent, transparent and accountable oversight system for monitoring of the actual energy savings and environmental performance of the green rated buildings. “CSE review of green rated buildings had earlier exposed how several buildings in India are grossly underperforming after being rated green,” said Anumita Roy Chowdhury, Executive Director, CSE.

CSE review of the green rating systems and the incentives has further shown that the cities of Maharashtra like Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad are doing this differently. Instead of giving incentive in the form of extra built up area it has rightly opted only for fiscal incentives that can be withdrawn if needed. This is a better practice than giving the extra built up area as once constructed it cannot be undone if found under-performing. But fiscal incentives can be withdrawn if buildings are not performing on energy and resource savings after becoming operational. “In fact Mumbai is taking an even better approach. Instead of incentives it is working on green code for all buildings. While the Maharashtra system can be further improved to be more explicitly linked with the actual performance, other state governments need to take cue from this system,” said Roy Chowdhury.

The reason for this concern over official incentive for green rating is the earlier assessment of CSE that had brought out that several buildings after obtaining the star ratings under the LEED rating were grossly under-performing and there is no transparency in data sharing by other agencies to assert performance of buildings rated by them. The government also has no oversight over these systems. This concern was discussed in the gathering of leading architects, experts and media in the Regional Dialogue that was organized by the Centre for Science and Environment on Building Sense in Pune. 

Aditya Chunekar from Prayas Energy Group, Pune presented on Energy Efficiency in Appliances and Ravindra Deshmukh of Samuchit Enviro Tech Pvt presented on decentralized domestic waste management.

 

For more details, please contact:

Avikal Somvanshi
Programme Officer,
Sustainable Buildings and Habitat Programme,
Centre for Science and Environment,
41, Tughlakabad Institutional Area, New Delhi - 110062 

Office: +91-11-29955124+91-11-29955124, 29956110, 40616000 (222)
Fax: +91-11-29955879