Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment (GRIHA)

Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment (GRIHA) Council is an independent, not- for -profit society jointly setup by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), Government of India to promote and administer green buildings in India.

GRIHA Council has over two decades of experience in green and energy efficient buildings. GRIHA Council evaluates the environmental performance of a building holistically over its entire life cycle and assesses the performance against certain nationally acceptable benchmarks, thereby providing a definitive standard for what constitutes a ‘green building’.

GRIHA is a rating system for green buildings in India developed by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). GRIHA is a rating tool that helps people assesses the performance of their building against certain nationally acceptable benchmarks. It evaluates 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 basic features of GRIHA

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:

• Pre-construction stage: (intra- and inter-site issues like proximity to public transport, type of soil, kind of land, where the property is located, the flora and fauna on the land before construction activity starts, the natural landscape and land features).
• 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 energy consumption, and occupant health and well-being, and also issues that affect the global and local environment).

GRIHA Rating has been acknowledged as a tool to evaluate reduction in emission intensity through habitats, as part of mitigation strategy for combating climate change in INDIA’s “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs) submitted to UNFCCC.

GRIHA has been responsible for making buildings environment friendly. More that 50 million sqm of building footprint has already been rated under the GRIHA Rating.