Life Cycle Costing of Institutional Buildings in India: A Case Study of GRIHA-Certified CPWD Buildings

Abstract

Buildings have an important role in mitigating, adapting, and developing resilience toward climate change. While green buildings help reduce construction’s detrimental impact on the environment, the real-estate market and select industry stakeholders remain unconvinced regarding the monetary returns of investment through building resource efficiency. Life cycle cost (LCC) assessment is an important tool used by professionals globally to assess the economic feasibility of green buildings over their service life. In India, LCC studies have been adopted for private-sector residential buildings. Moreover, municipal bodies have incentivized green buildings for private developers to offset any incremental initial cost. However, LCC calculation is yet to become mainstream within the public procurement system for institutional buildings in India. Considering that building owners and occupants would accrue any operational cost benefits of green buildings, this work aims to address issues regarding cost barriers for mainstreaming the LCC of green and sustainable institutional buildings in India. Indian public-sector organizations such as the Central Public Works Department (CPWD) have had a long-term financial interest in property, own large portfolios, and are committed to delivering a project’s best value to their clients. Accordingly, actual data from CPWD buildings and developing factors were used to create useful scenarios for future decisions based on the LCC of the buildings. Three GRIHA-rated CPWD projects were selected as case studies to investigate their LCCs. Results indicated that despite initial incremental expenditure, all the projects showed significant net savings at the end of 25 years. LCC comparison enables decision making for buildings with equal performances, while in the case of varying performances, LCC techniques relate the total LCC to identifiable units of performance to enable decisions.