Assessment of GRIHA and LEED on the parameters of sustainable design and development of buildings

Abstract

To practice design for sustainability in the domain of Building Design, Construction and Usage, we require Sustainability Assessment (SA) Methods, Tools and Techniques; which suggest pre-design as well as post completion checks to assess impact in terms of material and energy consumption, environment, society and economics. GRIHA and LEED are the leading SA methods currently in use in India. Since they originate from different countries with different contexts, level of technology and type of usage, they possess some degree of distinction over the other. A need was felt to gather these methods and discuss so that clarity can be drawn upon the scope defined by them to address sustainability. The objective of this paper is to analysis the chosen SA methods and evaluate their scope in terms of sustainability using the three pillars of sustainable development: Social, Economic, Environmental. A literature review based evaluation of methods was conducted. From the analysis, it is evident that both the tools are targeting towards Sustainable Buildings but the criteria list of GRIHA still lay more emphasis on the Environmental and Economic pillar and less on the Social pillar. LEED has good emphasis across all the three pillars. The paper ends with suggestions on a list of social, cultural and socio-economic criteria which can be added to GRIHA for further strengthening it on the Social pillar.