Months after announcing plans to achieve carbon-neutrality by 2050, Confederation of Real Estate Developers Association of India (CREDAI)'s newly elected president Boman Rustom Irani has said that this would be possible if 80 percent of builders across the country were to achieve net-carbon-zero status within the timeline.
“We follow the 80-20 rule — if we take care of the largest part of this business, or the largest part of where cities are being developed and make them go green, we’ve taken care of a large part of the problem,” said Irani in a chat with CNBC-TV18.
Irani was responding to a question on whether CREDAI’s decision to go net-carbon-zero by 2050 would receive consensus from across the board. “If you ask whether the last developer in the country will go carbon neutral by that year, I don’t think so,” he added.
In November, CREDAI announced that the industry planned to achieve carbon-neutrality in 2050 — twenty years ahead of the country’s vision of achieving the milestone by 2070. Over the weekend, Irani, flanked by outgoing CREDAI national president Harsh Vardhan Patodia and newly elected CREDAI MCHI president Dominic Rommel, said the industry body would kick-start this process by developing 4,000 green projects by 2030.
Over a fourth of those projects, it said, would take form and shape by 2025. In all, the target will translate to 4 lakh units.
“The industry needs to pull up its socks and accept changes. Today, when the world is talking green, there’s no way any industry can take a viewpoint that they won’t do it,” said Irani, “We want to educate our members and point them in this direction. The general feeling is that a green home is more expensive when it isn’t.”
As per an existing partnership with the Indian Green Building Council of India (IGBC), these developers’ proposed green developments are expected to receive green certification as part of a nationwide green building movement that CREDAI is spearheading.
The industry now believes incentives like existing tax rebates will play a key role in getting to the mark. “With the government — especially in Mumbai — giving you tax rebates for green buildings, these are like electric cars that pay you back over time,” Irani said.
Compliance challenges persist
There are other challenges to the industry’s sustainability plans in the near to medium term. One of these is compliance. Recently, Maha RERA sent out notices to 16,000 developers seeking project updates and information. A large number of these companies had not updated the latest information from their project sites — a mandate that the regulator laid down when it came into existence in 2017.
However, newly elected CREDAI MCHI President, Dominic Rommel clarified that this was merely due to a technicality concerning re-development projects in Mumbai. He said that the notices would be responded to and closed within the next couple of months.
“In a re-development project, even after obtaining my occupation certificate (OC), I have to pay a reversal tax, which in effect means I’m paying for unsold inventory,” he said, in a chat with CNBC-TV18, “If this was a private land, which I owned, I wouldn’t have paid after securing an OC because there are no services."
He added: "In Mumbai, we received our OCs, but didn’t upload our Form-4, and hence were served notices. Give us 45 days; that number from 16,000 will come down to around 1,000.”
The industry has also been under the scanner in Mumbai over decreasing air quality parameters owing to re-development work. However, the trade body said this was a one-off, while pointing out that air quality slowly has been improving since February when poor AQI levels were first reported.
(Edited by : Pradeep John)
First Published: Apr 17, 2023 10:11 PM IST
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