Towards a Harmonised Green Building Framework in India: Roles, Mandates and Opportunities
India’s building sector is a major and rapidly growing contributor to national energy demand, making energy-efficient and sustainable building practices critical to the country’s climate and development goals. While the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) is mandated under the Energy Conservation Act to develop and promote building energy codes such as the Energy Conservation and Sustainable Building Code (ECSBC) and Eco Niwas Samhita (ENS), voluntary green building rating systems have also emerged as influential drivers of sustainability in the built environment.
This note explores the relationship between statutory building energy codes and voluntary green building rating systems, highlighting key differences in governance, enforcement and performance focus. It also examines BEE’s proposed harmonised green building framework, identifying opportunities, strengths, policy gaps and implementation considerations for advancing a more coherent, performance-driven approach to sustainable buildings.
Key Recommendations
- Align green building rating systems with statutory energy codes: Develop a harmonised framework to improve alignment between voluntary green building rating systems and statutory energy codes, ensuring consistency in performance expectations, certification outcomes, and incentive structures while preserving the broader sustainability focus of the rating systems.
- Define mandatory energy performance thresholds: Establish mandatory thresholds for energy performance and operational carbon emissions as the foundation of any harmonised framework, while allowing rating systems to address broader sustainability objectives.
- Strengthen operational performance benchmarking: Develop a standardised framework for operational energy performance disclosure and EPI-based benchmarking, supported by robust reporting and normalisation methodologies to bridge the gap between predicted and actual energy use.
