The Age of Corporate GreenWash is Upon Us

My heart sank as I stood at the lectern and watched the expectant faces in the dimness of the hall. Here were about 50 faces, may be 80 who were all business leaders from large companies, architects, service consultants who shaped the destiny of many large buildings in India's cities.
All of them in their prime. Sharp heads for business. Seeing the potential for business, big business, that Green buildings and the future held.

There was great news that Prem C. Jain, the Chairman of the IGBC for the year, and a Delhi-based services consultant, had chortled of, with ill-concealed glee. "The Council has received applications from buildings across India for over 50 million square feet of Green Homes rating." 50 million? Had I heard it right? I told myself no, I sure must have misheard. I was tired after an early morning flight and the 2-hour ride through Hyderabad's traffic from the new airport into town. Sure, it cannot be true. But, well, he had said it again, but this time saying it the good old Indian way, "5 crore sft." That's right.

My heart sank. When I was invited by the Chairman to address this expectant audience, I was at a loss. I was speechless, tongue-tied.
I remembered the day, or a long night in 1994, when I tried in anger, indignation to persuade a bunch of development sector workers, all of them trained minds at that – to look at the possibility of offering what I called "an alternate solution to urban living". We were tired of having to shape our short-term fortunes on donor funds and finance-in-assistance.
So we launched an enterprise in late 1994 with money we borrowed. One of them who believed in the value, and 2 (or was it 3 others?) who believed in that first person.
And so, fire and brimstone and all, we launched BCIL. We bought 40 acres at under 3 lakhs an acre. A pittance by today's values for such lands in the close periphery of any city. We had to pay all of 96 lakhs to the seller -- a lot of money for him. For us, too.

And so we were set back by Rs 1 lakh that we had to seek as a loan, to pay the owner and offer him the promise of paying the rest in 18 months. He accepted, of course. It was a sizeable chunk of money for him. And he was willing to wait. He didn't have other takers. Oh, but of course.

We began a journey to purgatory. We began a long, very long haul that lasted as many as five years to create a 47-acre residential sprawl to the southwest of Bangalore which today is acknowledged to be one of the ten most coveted properties in the city - you will check www.transindus.com to know what it represents today.
And then rolled other such residential creations, rooted in the basic tenets of sustainable development, but striving, with more than some success I must say, to mainstream sustainability.
As I stood at this meeting on a warm early May afternoon in Hyderabad, words failed me. I could continue to be the romantic fool that I was then in the mid-90s, and I am still – although good friends assure me BCIL has done well, for having steered to reach Rs. 500 million of sales in 08-09, and heading toward doing Rs. 1000 million (or Rs 100 crore) in the year to come, with homes that are decidedly green with every element of sustainable design that people are talking about today, having been incorporated years before today.
All I could see as I stood there was how BCIL had lost it. In these 50 faces, I saw something scary. I saw competition of a kind which came from a context that was completely unemotional. To these professional builders – efficiency was it. And its ability to drive money.
It was, of course, not about being a 'protester against social conformity', it was not about love of nature, it was not about sensitivity to the Golden Oriole that would return to a settlement or campus after 10-12 years because of the species you planted way back when. It wasn't about a gentle but harrowingly long campaign for stewarding the land and its fledgling trees to invite rare avifauna back. I saw in that moment as I stood there talking to them, that it was not about a unique blend of beliefs, but was also about our failure in those early years at driving higher resources to greater efficiency.
And now comes a time when the Establishment has woken up to the possibility of 'another world that's possible'. When those words came as a clarion call from the World Social Forum, it had a ring of truth. Now it seemed like the big bad business world had found another chance to sink its teeth into the earth's vulnerable back.
Green, or greenwash? Are they just dangerously speaking the right words and the lingo, or are they doing greenwash? Who is 'they' and 'them'?
Under the mask, aren't we all masqueraders? With every change, however muted, isn't their destruction? Who are we kidding?

Standing at the podium, with these august leaders of business around me, words failed me. While it was depressing to see this swamp of interest in green buildings, and the stripping of a 'cause' into many elements of 'business viability', I was not quite sure anymore, who was right, who was wrong.
My wife is a journalist and an incurable variety of the same losing species of people who like to back losing horses, and bet on the underdog. She presented me a reprint of Picasso's Don Quixote and the windmill that hangs above my table in the little office I inhabit. It's a glaring reminder every morning of the naivette and foolishness I represent. I have wielded my sword, so she tells me, and have fought those illusory giants my eyes have told me are not windmills but monstrous evil giants that I must destroy for the good of the world. The Sancho Panzas of my world, like her, chide me on how I imagine these challenges that don't exist. I look at them balefully, turn around, and stir my steed into a speedier charge. The world has to be wrong. Cannot be any other way, can it?
...

It was TERI's GRUHA green homes rating system first. That was a year ago. Now it is the Green Homes rating of the CII-India Green Business Council that has been launched with little fanfare, but has drawn applications from residential projects totalling over 52 million sq. ft as of early May! The number of applications has crossed 50 companies! If the good soldiers and captains at IGBC steering this new rating system are not vigilant, the first flush of enthusiasm can lead to errors of excess; of overlooking the obvious; and failing to recognize the real from the pretence.
"These initial projects will help us learn from what these applicant-companies have done or are going to do as green elements. This will help us to refine the rating system for the future," says S. Srinivas, one of the few officers who put together the document as a pastiche of many such emergent green manifestos from around the world. From the GreenStar rating that the Aussies launched as recently as April this year, to the USGBC's document, to those that have been devised by BREEAM of the UK (a Code for Sustainable Buildings) and HQE, the French version of the Green Code.

That's a lot to choose from. And or what have the IGB Council's professionals picked, adapted and created in this founding document of the CII-IGBC that will create the very platform for an entire new future that it can open for the 400,000 crore industry that it represents over just the next decade years. So why's that figure for the next 10 years staggering or worrisome? Because in all of the last 50 years, we have built what we are set out to build in the next 7-10 years! On tourism infrastructure alone, I have it on the word of no less than Mr Banerjee, the Union tourism secretary, that projects have been cleared for hotels and resorts and retreats that will mean the addition of 100,000 rooms in the country over the next 5 to 7 years - you must remember that the current total of such rooms, built over all of 50 years, is 100,000 rooms!

Where, for instance, are the borewells going to be plunged to feed water? Where is the topsoil to make as many bricks; where is the limestone to make as much cement; what are the stone quarries that can offer as many polished pieces of granite that can adorn the rich homes that will be built in ever-increasing numbers; where is the power to be generated for feeding the needs of these buildings – residential, commercial, or for tourism. Where is the timber to make those windows, doors and ornately cut French windows?
Are we going to go, complacently, with the precedents of the past, and say to ourselves, it's not our job to worry about what the future will offer as solutions. Let the Government fret about water and energy; let administrators worry about the pressure on transportation infrastructure; or on the rapid depletion of natural resources.
Are there, at all, precedents from the past, into this future that is so full of challenges of a kind that the Earth has never seen before?
At the cusp of a new century that we are now in, clearly we can see that the solutions that the building industry is groping to find, are only part of a complex jigsaw of opportunities that will lead to innovation, if only we are sensitised to this plethora of needs.
But, you can't but reflect with a tinge of sadness, upon how values, in their own right and merit, don't have a chance of being recognised for what it can mean to the individual and at once as larger common good. A Gandhiji could inspire a Mira behn or an AC Kumarappan to drop all that they were doing in their lives and blend seamlessly at his feet to drive forces that were much larger than themselves. We live in a time that any such exalted value does not gain currency without its being endorsed by 'market acceptance' and cash.
There is a silver lining, though. I take heart from the fact that these new directions on securing greater efficiency of use of natural resources, will reflect, over the next decade, in more solutions that will approach, practically, the challenges in use of water, energy and in disposal of waste. The good news, with hope, is that over 50 years the world will be able to support twice the infrastructure that it now has, with the same amount of resource use [or abuse] that we are currently subjecting the Earth to.
Like Isaac Newton said, there will be others who will ride on the shoulders of these business warriors of today and, some day, see farther, and with greater sensitivity to the planet. Reaching accommodation with Nature is an ideal that will not easily be attained.

Hariharan
May 02, 08