Government of India has a vision of providing housing for all citizens by 2022. As a part of this “Housing for All” program, the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) has set a target of constructing over 19 million rural houses by 2022. Through this program, called the Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana – Gramin (PMAY-G), the government is providing direct financial assistance for construction of houses in rural areas.

Greening rural houses will reduce GHG emissions of the construction sector (accountable for about 22% of annual CO2 emission) and contribute to India’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of reducing “Emission intensity of GDP” by 20-25% by 2020 compared to 2005 levels. Technical assistance for program framework design, implementation mechanism, and overall facilitation assistance is provided by MAITREE Program in consultation with GGGI. The entire project is carried out in four phases, phase I is complete and under review with the Ministry:

Phase-I: A framework for greening the PMAY-G houses was developed. Supporting Government of India’s efforts towards greening the rural housing through the existing PMAY-G program, MAITREE assisted the following developments –

1. Developed a vision and definition of “Green Rural House” in the context of the rural housing scheme and included the same in the existing implementation framework.
2. Developed and defined the green performance indicators enabling to make the qualitative definition of “green” quantifiable and applicable across the entire nation.
3. Calculated the potential impact of the implementation of the green rural housing framework.
4. Developed the Implementation approach
5. Developed the technical framework including detailed methodology to define thresholds for “green”.
6. Developed a comprehensive list of requirements to improve performance across the project life cycle.
7. Conducted an expert consultation workshop to seek feedback. Over 60 experts attended the workshop, which included developers, architects, NGOs, bi-lateral organizations, central and state government officials, and representatives of building material industry.

Phase-II: Identification of location of demonstration houses, housing typologies, mason training modules.

Phase-III: Construction of demo houses and conducting mason trainings.

Phase-IV: Stakeholder consultation and workshops along with development of knowledge products to popularize the designs with the intention to integrate the designs improvements into the PMAY-G guidelines and policies.

This framework will be tested on 200 pilot projects and scaled up to a million rural houses which is projected as a tipping point towards transforming all of India’s rural houses to be constructed. A green PMAY-G house has a potential for savings of about 50% in water, 30% in GHG emissions and at least 25% more comfort compared to business as usual. For instance, for a million green PMAY-G houses, the potential for tangible savings would be:

1. GHG emissions – 6.7 million mTCO2e (Embodied + Operation).
2. Operational Energy – 2.8 BU/Year.
3. Water – 13 million KL per year.
4. Comfort 1,176 more comfort hours/house.

Resources

Framework for implementation of PMAY-G