The Green Visionary

While sharing his green vision in this interaction with Niranjan Mudholkar, Dr Prem Jain, Chairman of the Indian Green Building Council emphasises that the cost of a green building is only 2-5% more and is likely to come down further in the next two years

You were one of the founding fathers of the Green Building movement in India. Are you happy the way it has been evolving over the years?
Yes. The Green Building Movement is a wonderful journey to be on. I have been involved from day one along with Karan Grover and Jamshyd Godrej. The journey has been quite wholesome.

A challenge that still remains is the fact that the cost of green buildings is still higher than conventional buildings in India. The reason being we do not have enough products in India that are truly green. Of course, many people claim that their products are green but we do not know if that’s true. We do not have a system to validate the greenness of a product. Consequently, the evolution of green products in India has been very limited.
If we had more true green products, our movement would have progressed further. Therefore, we hold a congress where we encourage green products. We had five products when we started and now we have more than 100. I hope in a couple of years we should have more than a 1000 products. When the competition for green products grows the pricing will naturally come down and that will be a boost for the green building movement.

You were instrumental in setting up the Indian Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers (ISHRAE). Tell us something about that journey and ISHRAE’s synergy with the Indian Green Building Council (IGBC).
Ishrae has been a member of a society called ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers). I joined ASHRAE when I was a young student in Benares in the 50s. We always lacked something like this in India. So I started ISHRAE in 1980 on the footprints of Ashrae. It is identical to ASHRAE but Indianised.
In India, our best learning comes from shop-floor operators. They are the most knowledgeable and I have always learnt from them. I wanted to keep ISHRAE open to these people and hence I avoided the white-collared approach of ASHRAE.
For three years, ISHRAE operated from my home with 4-5 colleagues of mine joining in. We didn’t have a lot of money and our wives contributed about Rs100 per meeting from the month’s grocery account.
The second challenge was retaining members. After one year, we realised that the annual members were not renewing their memberships. So we started the concept of life-membership with a minimal fee of Rs500 per member. Today, we have 10,000 members with more than 20% being non-degree holders. To me, they are the best members.
Now, we have 35 autonomous chapters of ISHRAE operating profitably across the country. When we wanted to buy our first office way back in 1989-90, we were struggling to raise Rs7.5 lakh. Today, we have more than Rs7.5 crore in our coffers.
When we started IGBC, we realised that there was a need to have synergy between IGBC and ISHRAE. Fortunately, this has happened. About 3-4 years ago, the then president saw merit in linking ISHRAE with IGBC. It is now one of our strong supporters.
The logic is simple. Most of the energy in a building – particularly in a commercial building – goes in for air conditioning. If I have to make a Green Building then I must define my Air Conditioning low. IGBC and ISHRAE have been growing up like twin sisters and I treat them as my children.

According to the joint findings of Grant Thornton and Assocham released on March 26, 2010 in a paper titled ‘Indian Real Estate Vision 2020’, majority of builders and developers are still wary about adopting the green building concept due to the increased cost - 25-35% more than conventional construction. Your views.
I strongly disagree about the cost factor being so high for Green Buildings. Moreover, the cost varies with the type of certification of the green building – silver, gold and platinum. A basic green building costs only 2-5% more than a conventional building. The 2% cost is for someone like Vidur Bharadwaj who would have anyway built a good building. Five percent more is for someone who doesn’t take efforts in having a well-designed building. Any old building would cost about 5% more to convert it into a green building. Yes, a platinum certified building would cost about 10-12% more.
But I can’t agree that the costs are 25-35% more. In fact, a green building also doesn’t require more time to build. That’s why you find the Hiranandanis, the Rahejas, the Lodhas, the GMRs and many others going for green buildings. I did the Hyderabad Airport for GMR and it got a silver rating.
Why will they make a silver rated Green airport if it costs them 25% more? It actually cost GMR about 7-8% more at that time. Today, we are doing the Delhi airport for the same Group. And it is costing them only 5% more to get a green certification. When it is done, it will be the largest airport in the world to be certified Green.
The GMR Group is going green because it realises the merits. It knows that a green airport will be a lot healthier and will consume lesser energy. In fact, the energy savings for the airport would be around 20-25%. This will easily offset the 5% investment made in going green.
Today we have about 596 buildings in our country registered with us as green buildings amounting to approximately 380 million sq ft. These people have not paid 25-35% more to go green.

The concept of an MEP service provider is still relatively new in India but it has started to pick up. It must have been quite difficult for you when you started Spectral in 1980. Tell us about those times and do you think the green building concept is actually helping the growth MEP service providers and why?
You are quite right. When I came back to India after doing my PhD, we had very good consultants for air conditioning – Maneck Dastur; we had good consultants for electricals - Murthy; we had good consultants for plumbing - Menon. They were all giants in their fields but we did not have one unified consultant who offered all these services under one umbrella. Due to a lack of integrated approach, there was no optimisation of the services and hence the utilities were also costing more to the users.
I started Spectral with the aim of providing integrated and optimised MEP services. The first step was fully coordinated drawings; we faced a lot of resistance at that time and technically too it was quite difficult as there were no computers. But people soon saw the merit and we got six jobs.
We worked really hard and delivered. Then we bagged contract for the Asian Games in 1982 and that really helped us bring MEP as a discipline in the country. Today we have several MEP contractors in India and I am glad we started the journey.
Now about the link between green buildings and MEP. Green buildings mean optimised energy and optimised energy can only come through optimised MEP. Luckily I started integrated optimised MEP services twenty years ago and when the green building movement came to India, I was ready for it. Spectral already had this wealth of optimised MEP experience when IGBC started. One must appreciate that the largest operating cost in a building is MEP.

The Leed India rating system has had its days of glory but it has also faced criticism. Some have called it too commercialised while the proponents of Griha (TERI’s rating system for Green Buildings) have criticised it by calling it too homogenized and not encouraging innovation and diversity. Your views.
Although Griha came much later than Leed India I have great respect for this system. I must say that Mili Majumdar of TERI has done a phenomenal job to bring a wholly Indianised system with Griha. Griha has also been adopted by the Government of India, which is wonderful.
When the original Leed came to us, we recognised that it was a very Americanised system. We Indianised the system by putting more emphasis on things that need more attention in India like water, safety, fire safety and so on. BEE too has started the Star rating system for energy consumption and I welcome it.
In fact, I believe we need more and more systems so that there is no complacency. I have no problems with having more rating systems just that they must keep evolving.
Griha has not undergone any change ever since it was started by TERI in 2004-2005. On the other hand, Leed has undergone three changes ever since we started it. It is a constantly evolving system. I think this is where Leed scores over Griha.In terms of innovation, Leed has five out of sixty points for innovation. That is almost ten percent.
Sometimes you also hear the objection that Leed means only air conditioning. That is not the case. Take the example of the Police HQ in Gulbarga in Karnataka. It has a Leed Gold rating and uses the ancient Indian concept of cooling towers (Sheetal Minars) instead of electrical air conditioning systems. One must also understand that the Leed rating system is used in India only for commercial buildings. For other structures and systems, we have the IGBC Green Home rating, the IGBC Green factory rating, the IGBC Green city rating and so on.
To sum it up, I would say all these rating systems should continue to grow consistently together. Over a period of time, they should grow more respectful of each other and have some kind of synergy.

Do you think the Indian government has put in place policies that help further the cause of green architecture? What more needs to be done?
A lot more needs to be done. I will give you one example. Today, Vidur Bharadwaj has done Lotus Boulevard which is green. The power tariffs and the taxes that this project has to pay are no different than the conventional building standing next to it that wastes energy and water.
The other building will require one ton of AC for 150 sq ft while Vidur’s building would require one AC for 250 sq ft. The user gets the advantage of lower bills but not of lower tariff. So if someone is saving the nation’s energy why should he be charged the same tariff that is charged to someone who is wasting nation’s energy?
Take the example of a country like Singapore which has lower tariffs, lower taxes, lower insurance and even lower interest housing loan rates for green buildings. So the government should incentivise green buildings through lower charges.
I am happy that SBI is charging half percent less on home loans taken for IGBC Green Homes. We will soon be approaching ICICI and HDFC for the same. Similarly, the government needs to do its bit in promoting the movement. Of course, we are not sitting idle.
We are already speaking with the state governments and many state governments have directed us to municipalities. And we are working with the municipalities upwards. Many municipalities in states like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra are willing to adopt green measures and giving incentives to green buildings. Of course, our fight is going to take long.