This video blog by Nicole Revah Tacher, Program Coordinator, Crux Alliance, tells the story of GBPN’s Healthy Buildings Project in India through interviews with GBPN India’s Managing Director, Dr. Sunita Purushottam, and GBPN India’s Project Manager, Maaz Dixit, and with Siraz Hirani, Director of Programs at GBPN’s project partner, Mahila Housing Trust. The blog concludes with a short film spotlighting the project’s potential to scale healthy, low-carbon housing across India.
India is undergoing an extremely rapid urban transition. Experts estimate that 86 percent of the building stock that will exist in 2070 is yet to be built, meaning the country urgently needs millions of new affordable homes. But speed can come at a cost. Features that make homes climate-appropriate, healthy, and environmentally sound have traditionally been overlooked, and rapid urbanization is expected to drive up both energy demand and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The people most exposed to the consequences of climate change—heat waves, droughts, floods, and storms—are often poor and less equipped to withstand extreme events.
India also has an estimated 42 million home-based workers, most of them women whose health, wellbeing, and livelihoods are directly threatened by climate events. Quick, cheap construction harms residents’ health and locks in carbon emissions for decades. The Global Buildings Performance Network (GBPN), the Crux Alliance lead for building policy, set out to break this trade-off by leading the development of new design guidelines for healthy, climate-resilient affordable housing in India.
GBPN works to cut building-sector emissions through a bottom-up, collaborative approach. Rather than imposing top-down frameworks, it empowers local experts and works with regional coalitions to co-create building policies that fit the local context. GBPN brought its approach to India in 2018, focusing on decarbonizing the fast-growing building sector through state-level policy implementation, building code development and enforcement, and sustainable affordable housing initiatives.
As this work progressed, a critical gap became clear: low-income families bear the brunt of severe heat waves and climate events, and many cannot afford air conditioning or high electricity bills to stay safe. Poorly designed homes can trap heat to the point that they become more dangerous than the outdoors, threatening residents’ health. GBPN set out to shift affordable housing toward a human-centric model, in which homes are structurally resilient, naturally ventilated, and safe for the people who live in them.
To build the evidence for this approach, GBPN launched its two-year Healthy Affordable Homes research project in 2022 with Ashok B Lall Architects (ABLA), the Indian Institute of Public Health Gandhinagar (IIPH-G), and Monash University. The research included extensive literature reviews, field visits to existing affordable housing developments, and community consultation with a particular focus on women. On the ground, GBPN worked with Mahila Housing Trust (MHT), an Ahmedabad-based organization that supports low-income women on housing, which helped the team access affordable housing sites in Ahmedabad and Rajkot to measure indoor air temperature and to hold focus group discussions with residents.
One of the main research findings was that indoor temperatures reached 37°C (98.6°F) in the hottest months, causing severe discomfort, health risks, and more instances of domestic violence, demonstrating the need to redefine building performance beyond emissions and energy standards. The Healthy Affordable Homes project aimed to produce evidence-based recommendations for building standards covering indoor and outdoor environmental quality in affordable housing.
In November 2022, in partnership with ABLA and the Public Health Foundation in India (PHFI), GBPN signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Avenue Realty, a local developer in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, to build a new affordable housing development with 140 units that could serve as a demonstration project. The MoU set up the project’s first design charrette (an intensive, hands-on design session with the developer’s team) to recommend healthy-building features such as openable ventilators, energy-efficient fans, light-colored floor finishes, and LED lighting. The project also incorporated lower sill levels to minimize heat gain, particularly in the bedrooms, and thicker wall assemblies to reduce conductive heat transfer throughout the building, along with other efficiency, sustainability, and resiliency features.
In 2023, GBPN and ABLA published the first phase of findings in a white paper, Healthy Affordable Housing in India: Prioritising the Well-being of Occupants in the Design and Construction of Low-income Housing. It showed how little India’s building codes say about occupant health and confirmed that climate impacts inside homes hit women and low-income families hardest. The paper also laid out a roadmap for India’s housing and health ministries and the Bureau of Indian Standards to align their policies around healthy affordable housing, making the case that the upcoming revision of the National Building Code was the moment to act.
At the start of 2024, the Bureau of Indian Standards confirmed it would appoint ABLA, GBPN’s local partner, to review the National Building Code and Indian Standards for affordable housing, with the purpose of incorporating GBPN’s healthy low-carbon housing guidelines. Because the NBC is updated only about once a decade, the appointment gave GBPN’s recommendations a rare, direct pathway into national building standards. GBPN followed up with an expert consultation in New Delhi, presenting its draft Design Guidelines for Healthy and Climate-Resilient Affordable Housing to specialists from the buildings, health, and climate sectors, including NGOs, research institutes, financial institutions, and private-sector builders.
Code revisions take years, and private developers are building much of India’s new affordable housing right now. To close that gap, GBPN built on its Avenue Realty pilot and, in 2024, expanded its design charrette program to private affordable housing developers across India. GBPN held working sessions to help developers incorporate its low-carbon, healthy-homes guidelines into live projects, focusing not only on quantitative energy metrics but also on residents’ health and well-being. In August 2025, GBPN publicly launched its Design Guidelines for Healthy and Climate-resilient Affordable Housing to help the private sector begin implementing them ahead of the formal update.
By August 2025, GBPN’s recommendations had been incorporated into the draft revision of India’s National Building Code circulated for review, a major step toward formally embedding healthy, climate-resilient standards into how affordable housing is built nationwide. GBPN is continuing to engage with local governments and communities to bring these standards to new homes.
Recently, GBPN has signed two new MoUs with the Institute of Town Planners, India (ITPI), Haryana Regional Chapter (HRC), and the Vadodara Municipal Corporation (VMC). These partnerships will enable more integrated planning approaches to help city governments better manage extreme weather and rapid urban growth. Urban residents will benefit from better thermal comfort, safer neighborhoods, and healthier buildings. GBPN will continue to support the state’s climate action goals through design interventions in urban development, strengthening building codes, and bringing health to the forefront of planning and implementation.