The context
Internationally, voluntary building rating systems have been instrumental in raising awareness and popularizing green design. However, most of the internationally devised rating systems have been tailored to suit the building industry of the country where they were developed. TERI, being deeply committed to every aspect of sustainable development, took upon itself the responsibility of acting as a driving force to popularize green building by developing a tool for measuring and rating a building's environmental performance in the context of India's varied climate and building practices. This tool, by its qualitative and quantitative assessment criteria, would be able to ‘rate’ a building on the degree of its ‘greenness’. The rating would be applied to new and existing building stock of varied functions – commercial, institutional, and residential.

The challenges
The Indian building industry is highly decentralized, involving diverse stakeholders engaged in design, construction, equipment provision, installation, and renovation of buildings. Each group may be organized to some extent, but there is limited interaction among the groups, thus disabling the integrated green design and application process. Hence, it is very important to define and quantify sustainable building practices and their benefits. It is also imperative to delineate the role of each actor in ensuring that the building consumes minimal resources in its entire life cycle and leaves behind minimal environmental footprint.

The benefits
TERI's green building rating will evaluate the environmental performance of a building holistically over its entire life cycle, thereby providing a definitive standard for what constitutes a ‘green building’. The rating system , based on accepted energy and environmental principles, will seek to strike a balance between the established practices and emerging concepts, both national and international. The guidelines/criteria appraisal may be revised every three years to take into account the latest scientific developments during this period.

On a broader scale, this system, along with the activities and processes that lead up to it, will benefit the community at large with the improvement in the environment by reducing GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions, improving energy security, and reducing the stress on natural resources.

Some of the benefits of a green design to a building owner, user, and the society as a whole are as follows:
Reduced energy consumption without sacrificing the comfort levels
Reduced destruction of natural areas, habitats, and biodiversity, and reduced soil loss from erosion etc.
Reduced air and water pollution (with direct health benefits)
Reduced water consumption
Limited waste generation due to recycling and reuse
Reduced pollution loads
Increased user productivity
Enhanced image and marketability

TERI-GRIHA’s green design practices, and the array of individual and institutional professionals who put these in practice, would be publicized and promoted for the following reasons.

It has immense replication probability for ‘seeing is believing’.
It motivates the user and the owner to fulfil their commitment to the environment by emulating the example it sets.
It helps generate awareness on the concept of green bulding.
It stimulates competition among peers to achieve the same performance or to endeavour to better it.

The development process
TERI's green building rating system (TERI–GRIHA) has been developed after a thorough study and understanding of the current internationally accepted green building rating systems and the prevailing building practices in India. The team has researched on several international rating systems. A few team members were also sponsored under a study tour by USAEP (United States Asia Environmental Partnership) to understand the eco-rating systems prevalent in the US. The team has vast experience in providing design assistance to green buildings in the country and long and varied experience in carrying out energy conservation studies in existing hotels, offices, and other commercial building. The team has effectively utilized the several multi-disciplinary strengths and experiences of the colleagues at TERI to arrive at the tools that addresses cross-cutting issues in the design, development, and operation of a green building.

The primary objective of the rating system is to help design green buildings and, in turn, help evaluate the ‘greenness’ of the buildings. The rating system follows best practices along with national/international codes that are applicable to achieving the intent of green design.

The green building rating system devised by TERI is a voluntary scheme. It has derived useful inputs from the upcoming mandatory voluntary building codes/guidelines being developed by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency, the Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy Sources, MoEF (Ministry of Environment and Forests), Government of India, and the Bureau of Indian Standards. The rating system aims to achieve efficient resource utilization, enhanced resource efficiency, and better quality of life in the buildings.

The basic features
Currently the system has been developed to help ‘design and evaluate’ new buildings (buildings that are still at the inception stages). A building is assessed based on its predicted performance over its entire life cycle – inception through operation. The stages of the life cycle that have been identified for evaluation are the pre-construction, building design and construction, and building operation and maintenance stages. The issues that get addressed in these stages are as follows.
Pre-construction stage (intra- and inter-site issues)
Building planning and construction stages (issues of resource conservation and reduction in resource demand, resource utilization efficiency, resource recovery and reuse, and provisions for occupant health and well being). The prime resources that are considered in this section are land, water, energy, air, and green cover.
Building operation and maintenance stage (issues of operation and maintenance of building systems and processes, monitoring and recording of consumption, and occupant health and well being, and also issues that affect the global and local environment).