Mahindra Lifespaces – Transforming urban landscapes by creating sustainable communities

We live in a world that is currently grappling with rising population, global climate change, growing social inequity and multiple challenges in the context of sustainable infrastructure creation.  Like most major emerging economies, India too is faced with multiple development-related challenges, as it experiences population and economic growth, and accelerating urbanization therein.

According to estimates, around 600 million people are expected to make urban India their home by 2031.   As our cities and towns grow, there is a pressing need to carefully plan for India’s urbanization journey; to ensure that it embraces in equal measure the people/communities who are the key intended beneficiaries of this development journey, the environment, and the economic objectives that accompany long-term sustainable growth.  At Mahindra Lifespaces, we believe that if developed responsibly and responsively, cities (and individual buildings) have the potential to be places where high living standards can be delinked from unsustainable levels of consumption of all three types of resources - environmental, financial and human.  India’s impending urbanization thus presents both opportunities and challenges, each of which must be evaluated to get things right and achieve new, sustainable standards of urban development.  We believe the answer lies in Sustainable Urbanisation encompassing business responsibility, environmental stewardship and community outreach. 

Mahindra Lifespaces is constantly exploring ways in which we can integrate Sustainability into process, product and service innovation.  All our ongoing and forthcoming projects across 8 Indian cities are IGBC (India Green Building Council) Green Homes Certified.  Furthermore, Mahindra World City Chennai (India’s first integrated business city to have been developed in PPP) is India’s first IGBC Gold Certified integrated business city.

This year, we have chosen to focus on capacity building, collaborations, institutionalizing best practices and knowledge sharing.

1.       Mahindra Lifespaces has collaborated with WRI to pilot test two global GHG accounting tools.

2.       We are active participants in the Climate Positive Development Programme (C40), under which Mahindra World City Jaipur (our second integrated business city project in India) has been declared the world’s largest project to receive C40 Climate Positive Stage 2 Certification.

3.       In association with Tech Mahindra, we are developing a comprehensive ‘SMART City Management’ framework to make MWC Jaipur a living lab for a Smart City.

4.       As a signatory of India Business & Biodiversity Initiative (IBBI) declaration, MWC Chennai has undergone a comprehensive biodiversity assessment and has developed strategies for better biodiversity management.

5.       We participated in the plenary ‘India Energy Efficiency in Buildings Laboratory’ organized under the aegis of WBCSD.

6.       We have identified 150 of our biggest suppliers, and will be mentoring and motivating them towards becoming responsible partners in our sustainability journey.

7.       We have launched the Green Army Initiative – An outreach program that identifies children as primary change agents of the future and aims to educate them on sustainable living habits and choices whilst encouraging them to spread the word amongst friends and family.  We launched the campaign with a target of creating catalysts through one million caring citizens across the nation.  During the past year, we have conducted pilot projects in 13 schools across Mumbai, a figure we hope to better in the upcoming second edition of the campaign this year.

8.       We have provided feedback to the Gold Standard Cities Programme – A results based finance framework, it enable cities to develop, audit and verify urban programmes in order to unlock the finance needed by cities around the globe for low carbon development.

People are integral to the Sustainability journey; in other words, the success of sustainability efforts and initiatives are commensurate with their scale and reach.  Recognising the fact that quality housing is a large, unmet need for a wide cross-section of people in India, we have forayed into the Affordable Housing segment with the launch of our brand ‘Happinest’ in Mumbai (Boisar) and Chennai (Avadi).  With a large chunk of prospective Affordable Housing customers working in the informal sector and thus unable to produce documentation for securing formal home finance, we have focused on creating an ecosystem for access to finance by partnering with NBFCs that survey their financial capability and accordingly approve home loans.  Happinest has witnessed an overwhelming response from customers across different social spectrums ranging from teachers, bank employees, government employees, industrial workers, street vendors and contractual employees.

Mahindra Lifespaces has formulated a biodiversity management plan to enhance biodiversity and nurture the local ecosystem at Happinest Boisar.  A detailed biodiversity assessment study was recently undertaken to create an inventory of the flora and fauna, identify endangered and threatened species if any, and study the vegetation profile within a 2 km radius of the project site. 

Sustainability being deeply ingrained in our day to day business decisions and operations, we have, basis inputs from an enhanced stakeholder base (comprising both internal and external stakeholders), defined a Sustainability Roadmap for 2020, which identifies aggressive targets towards all three bottom-lines and helps align efforts with the needs of the ecosystem at large.  As we expand our construction footprint, we are constantly evaluating methods to reduce our environment footprint; at the same time, we are improving our project timelines via the use of innovative construction best practices.  We aim to maximize the quality of life of our customers while optimizing the consumption of every unit of resource – through reduction, reuse and recycling.

Shah Meet