Mumbai Mania

Its a sign of changing with times or cashing in on the latest trend, whichever way you look at it, the city is taking steps to live in an eco-friendly environment.

Several buildings in Mumbai are being built with eco-friendly amenities and using natural resources to generate power.

These eco-friendly green buildings come with their own rainwater harvesting, solar panel system, and water recycling system.

Lets take an example of one of the buildings in Mumbai, that has successfully managed to cut electricity cost, face water shortage and cause no harm to the environment. Daulat bungalow in Juhu Vile Parle Development Scheme (JVPD), one of the first few to go green, switched over to hybrid power in 2002.

The hybrid system consists of windmill, solar panels, batteries and an inverter. It uses solar and wind energy to generate electricity, around 1800 kw of electricity enough to run at least a fan and a tube-light in every room of this seven-storey building at a given point in time. It can also bear the load of some televisions and computers.

The cost of installing this system was Rs 2.5 lakhs, and since government gives 50% subsidy on these set-ups, it becomes a viable option. Of course the cost of green buildings is 3% to 8% more than regular buildings, but the higher cost is recovered within 2-3 years due to savings in energy and water bills.

Currently there are 315 green buildings in India (they would be registered with Indian Green Building Council), including 250 commercial. They include IT parks, hospitals, airports and educational institutions.

Nearly 20% of those buildings are in Mumbai alone, a positive sign. Some of the major green buildings in the city are, Hiranandani BG Building, K Raheja group, Enercon India and Kalpataru building.

So at least this trend won’t harm the environment, but considering a majority of Mumbai's population lives in slums it seems environment friendly is only for the higher income brackets.