Environmental Cell at the Level of Local Authority
An Environmental Cell shall be setup at the local authority level to support compliance and monitoring of environmental conditions in buildings. The Cell shall also provide assistance in environmental planning and capacity building within their jurisdiction. The responsibility of this cell would be monitoring the implementation of this notification and providing an oversight to the Third-Party Auditing process. The cell will operate under the local authority.
Constitution of the cell:
The cell will comprise of at least 3 dedicated experts in following fields:
(a) Waste management (solid and liquid)
(b) Water conservation and management
(c) Resource efficiency including Building materials
(d) Energy Efficiency and renewable energy
(e) Environmental planning including air quality management.
(f) Transport planning and management.
The Cell shall induct at least two outside experts as per the requirements and background of dedicated experts. Existing environmental cells at the level of local authority can be co-opted and trained for this Cell.
Financial Support:
An additional fee may be charged along with processing fee for building License for integrating environmental conditions and it’s monitoring. The local authority can fix and revise this additional fee from time to time. The amount of this fee shall be deposited in a separate bank account, and used for meeting the requirement of salary / emoluments of experts and running the system of online application, verifications and the Environmental Cell.
Functions of the Cell:
(1) The cell shall be responsible for assessing and appraising the environmental concerns of the area under their jurisdiction where building activities are proposed. The Cell can evolve and propose additional environmental conditions as per requirements. These conditions may be area specific and shall be notified in advance from time to time. These additional conditions shall be approved following a due consultation process. These environmental conditions will be integrated in building Licenses by the sanctioning authority.
(2) Develop and maintain an online system for application and payment of fees. The Cell shall maintain an online database of all applications received, projects approved, the compliance audit report, random inspections made. The Cell shall maintain a portal for public disclosure of project details including self-certification and compliance audit reports filed by the Qualified Building Environment Auditors for public scrutiny of compliance of environmental conditions by the project.
(3) Monitoring the work of Environmental Audit process carried by the Qualified Building Auditors.
(4) The Cell shall review the applications; finalize the additional environmental conditions if required within 15 days of the submission of the application to the local authority.
(5) The Cell shall adopt risk based random selection of projects for verifying on site for certification of QBA, compliance of environmental conditions and yearly audit report.
(6) The Cell shall recommend to the local authority for financial penalty for non-compliance of environmental conditions by the project proponent.
(7) The Cell shall recommend to the accrediting body and the local authority against any Qualified Building Environment Auditor, if any lapse is found in their work.