How to Verify a Green Building Claim Yourself

Green claims are the least regulated sentences in Indian property marketing. A registration number can be checked against a register. A completion certificate is issued by an authority or it is not. But "eco-friendly", "green-rated", "water positive" and "sustainable living" are adjectives, and adjectives do not have registers.

What they do have is a small number of checks that separate a credential from a mood. Four of them, in order, and none needs more than a phone and a browser.

Check one: ask for the document, not the adjective

Everything starts here. A green rating produces a letter. That letter names five things, and each one is a hinge.

• The issuing body — IGBC, GRIHA, GBCI, the EDGE programme. If no body is named anywhere, there is no award, only a description.
• The rating system — not just the acronym but which of that body's systems, and whether it is the residential one.
• The project name — the one on the letter, which may not be the marketing name.
• The applicant — usually the registered legal entity rather than the trading brand.
• The stage and the date — design assessment or completed building, and when.

A sales team that cannot produce the letter has not necessarily done anything wrong. Sometimes the document sits with the project's green consultant and takes a day to arrive. But "we'll send it" that never becomes an attachment is an answer in itself, and it is a cheap thing to test early.

Check two: find the project in the issuing body's own directory

Each council publishes its own list of projects that have registered against and been rated under its systems. That list is the second, independent view of the same fact, and it is free.

Search on the names from the letter, not on the brand. Two things go wrong here and both are ordinary rather than sinister. Directories lag, so a recent award may not appear yet. And a project sold under one name may be listed under the promoter's own, which is why you collected the applicant name in check one.

The outcome you want is a match. The outcome that requires a conversation is a mismatch you cannot explain. The outcome that ends the conversation is a project that appears nowhere and a letter nobody can produce.

Check three: establish the stage

This is the check that changes what you have been promised, and it takes one sentence to run: is this an assessment of the design, or of the completed building?

A design-stage assessment is real. An outside body read drawings, specifications and calculations against a published standard and made a decision. It is also, unavoidably, a statement about intentions — the building did not exist when it was made. Final certification is awarded against what was built, from as-built documentation and commissioning data.

Both are worth having. Only one of them tells you what the building is. If the person you are talking to uses the two words interchangeably, you have learned something about how carefully the rest of their claims were made.

Check four: establish the scope

Is the claim about the company or about this project? The two get blurred constantly, usually without anyone deciding to blur them.

"We are committed to green building" is a practice statement. It can be entirely honest and it says nothing about the building you would buy. "This project holds a design-stage assessment under the residential rating system, issued on this date" is a project statement. Ask which one you have been given, and if the answer is the first, ask for the second.

The same test applies across a portfolio. A developer with eight projects and one rating is entitled to describe the rating. It is not entitled to let the reader carry it across the other seven.

The red flags, in the order you meet them

• A rating level with no letter. A level is decided when an award is made. Printed before that, it came from a design meeting, not from a council.
• A company-level claim on a project page. Structurally true, locally misleading. Ask which sentence is about which thing.
• A percentage saving with no meter behind it. Ask what was measured, over what period, against what baseline. A model is a projection.
• A superlative. Among the greenest, the most sustainable, the first of its kind. Comparatives need a stated basis and a date; without them there is nothing to check and nothing to disprove.
• A logo with no sentence. The mark of a council placed on a page, with no claim written underneath it, is doing the work of a claim while remaining deniable.
• Features in the brochure and not in the annexure. The last and most expensive one. What binds a developer is the specification attached to the agreement you sign.

What a straight answer sounds like

It is short, and it is specific about the boundary of what is known. Something close to: "This project holds a design-stage pre-certification from IGBC under its residential rating system, issued on this date to this entity. There is no final certificate, because the building is not complete. No rating level has been issued, because levels are decided at final certification. Here is the letter, and here is the specification annexure with these features in it."

Nobody memorises that. But a team that has been told to be accurate answers in that shape, and a team that has been told to close answers by pointing at a photograph of a podium garden.

Running the four checks on us

This post would be worthless if it were only pointed outward, so here is the same test applied at home.

1. The document. SUYUG records a design-stage IGBC pre-certification for both of its apartment projects at Sompura Gate, THE1 and Saffron. The letters are what the sales team should hand you when you ask; if that does not happen, the failure is ours.
2. The directory. Search on the promoter name, which differs from the trading brand. Both names, with each project's registration number and regulator, are transcribed on our registrations page for exactly this purpose.
3. The stage. Design stage. No SUYUG project holds a final IGBC certificate, and this site says so in that wording wherever the subject comes up.
4. The scope and the numbers. The green practice statement on this site is a company-level description. The pre-certification is a project-level credential. And this site publishes no percentage saving for water or energy, because none has been metered across an occupied year — which is the whole point of check four's last red flag.

The full position, including what we cannot yet measure, is on our sustainability page.