Hyderabad is one of the few Indian cities to adopt green building rules to save energy and water
City buildings harness nature for light and air
One of the ways that people in Hyderabad have been leading the initiative for conservation is by constructing green buildings that reduce water and electricity consumption by 1520 per cent.
In Hyderabad, many large multinational corporations, educational institutions and even individuals have been constructing green buildings with help from the Indian Green Building Council.
In fact, the country’s first Indian Green Building Council certified house was built in Hyderabad in 2009. There are, as of now, 153 Indian Green Building projects in Telangana of which 130 are in Hyderabad. There are also 1200 IGBC certified architects in the city. Some of the better known buildings in Hyderabad that are IGBC certified belong to Infosys, the National Remote Sensing Center of ISRO, Mindspace IT Park and Indian School of Business.
The CII-Sohrabji Godrej Green Business Centre in Hyderabad was the first building outside the United States of America to receive a LEED Platinum rating and is one of the greenest buildings in the country. One of Hyderabad’s most coveted projects, the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, was recently recognised for its efforts in managing and reducing carbon emissions in the Asia-Pacific region. The city’s first green residential apartment was built in Gachibowli recently, indicating that even real estate developers were getting interested in the concept. Green buildings are designed and built using such materials that the need for consumption of excess power and water automatically goes down. Head of Green Buildings Division, Mr S. Srinivas said, “An important aspect of green building is to encourage enough daylight and ventilation. This will automatically result in less usage of power.”
GREEN BUILDING ASPECTS
Spectrally neutral glass is used for maximising daylight effectiveness and using fly ash bricks and insulation of roofs for maintaining temperatures below normal. A few other important aspects of green buildings are using faucets that do not disperse excess water, and utilisation of water conservation measures like rainwater harvesting and so on.