Context:
The Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) India’s premier knowledge and practice institution working on the equitable, sustainable, and efficient transformation of Indian settlements, anchors ASSURE, conceived as the world’s largest organised initiative for realising high performance buildings (HPBs), in a knowledge partnership with Infosys. (Infosys, a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting and an early mover in setting up and achieving ESG goals and transitioning to low-carbon operations, is India’s largest builder of HPBs, with 30 million sq ft in current use.)
ASSURE, envisaged to be executed over 2024-30, prioritises HPBs in recognition of: (a) the large, growing, and energy and emission intensive real estate sector activity in India; (b) the prospects of massive energy and emission lock-in, poor living and working conditions, and green and circular diseconomies if business continues as usual; and, (c) the game-changing promise HPBs hold for meeting business, climate and sustainability, innovation, and job creation goals, as the experience of domestic pioneers such as Infosys has shown. ASSURE’s initial focus is on commercial buildings, given their significantly higher energy and emission intensity per unit area compared to residential buildings.
ASSURE appreciates that the promise of HPBs can only be realised with demonstration of effective implementation and a systematic effort to address the range of policy, financing, regulatory, and capacity gaps currently constraining design, construction, and retrofit of HPBs at scale. Therefore offers technical assistance for lighthouse projects to some of India’s largest real estate developers, invest significantly in capacity development of current and future practitioners, support innovation in a sector where technologies and approaches have remained fundamentally unchanged for decades, deliver a performance measurement and verification platform intended to incentivise HPB adoption and financing, and engage with policymakers and financial sector decision-makers to usher enabling policies and financing arrangements for HPBs.