Green building comes to the city of ghats: Kashi hosts its first Green Varanasi Conclave

Varanasi has spent the last few years adding buildings quickly — hotels, offices, transit stops, campuses. This month the city sat down to ask how those buildings should be made. The Confederation of Indian Industry and the Indian Green Building Council held the first Green Varanasi Conclave, under the theme of preserving heritage while building a sustainable future. The numbers put Kashi further along than most people would guess. The council counts 38 registered green projects in the city, together covering 5.73 million square feet — 28 of them commercial, six residential, two in industry and logistics, and two in transit infrastructure. Fifteen buildings have already been certified. Across Uttar Pradesh the registered figure runs past 1,700 projects. The conclave brought planners, builders and academics into one room, with Varanasi Municipal Commissioner Himanshu Nagpal among those present, and a panel on sustainable urban transformation that drew people from IIT (BHU), Larsen & Toubro and CREDAI Purvanchal. The most durable outcome may be the smallest one: an IGBC student chapter has been launched at IIT (BHU), Varanasi. It means the next set of engineers trained in this city will learn energy-efficient, climate-resilient design as a normal part of the job — which is how a green-building habit actually takes root in a place.

Compiled by HelloBanaras from public sources: Construction World