India is approaching a building boom that will shape its energy demand and carbon footprint for decades. The country’s building stock is projected to rise from about 17.8 billion sq m in 2020 to 42.5 billion sq m by 2070. After accounting for demolition, 86% of the building stock that will exist in 2070 is yet to be built. That means the next four decades offer a narrow opportunity to determine the performance of most of the buildings that will make up India’s future built environment.
The significance is not simply how much India will build, but what gets embedded into that construction. A building’s orientation, envelope, glazing, insulation, cooling systems and material choices can determine energy demand and emissions over decades. Once these decisions are locked into a completed building, correcting them is considerably harder than incorporating performance requirements during design and construction.
The first problem is not the absence of a code
India already has a regulatory framework for building energy performance. The Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) was introduced for commercial buildings in 2007 and revised in 2017. In 2024, the Bureau of Energy Efficiency introduced the Energy Conservation and Sustainable Building Code (ECSBC), expanding the framework to include sustainability parameters alongside energy efficiency. The residential framework has evolved through the Eco-Niwas Samhita and the newer residential ECSBC-R.
The difficulty is implementation. Building regulation is largely administered through states and local bodies, so a national code does not automatically become a uniformly enforceable requirement for every new building. States have to notify and operationalise the relevant framework, while municipal authorities incorporate requirements into local approval and building-control processes.This creates a distinction that is critical to understanding India's building-code system: a code being notified is not the same as that code being embedded in municipal approvals. As of a June 2025 government update, 26 States and Union Territories had notified ECBC, while 13 had incorporated ECBC requirements into building bye-laws. Kerala had also become the first state reported to have notified ECSBC. The figures therefore need to be read as separate stages of implementation rather than as a single measure of national compliance.The newer code also does not immediately replace the older regulatory landscape across the country. Different jurisdictions can be at different stages of adoption and implementation, leaving developers and local authorities operating under different requirements.
Then comes the question of what gets built
For a building code to reduce future cooling demand, compliance has to extend beyond the drawing board.The building envelope is central to this. Walls, roofs, windows and glazing determine how much heat enters the building and therefore how much cooling the building subsequently requires. Yet the regulatory challenge is not simply specifying an envelope standard. It is establishing who checks that the specified performance is actually delivered in the completed building.There is no single verification system operating uniformly across India. The compliance mechanism can involve government officials, certified energy auditors, third-party assessors or self-declaration, depending on the jurisdiction. The implementation assessment also identifies limited municipal capacity, manual compliance processes and shortages of qualified professionals as constraints on enforcement.
That makes municipal enforcement a critical link between the code and the physical building.Telangana provides an example of a more structured system. Its ECBC process uses third-party assessors to review designs before construction and verify materials and construction during the project. Municipal authorities can conduct inspections, and compliance verification feeds into the occupancy-certification process. The system also provides for inspections after the occupancy certificate has been issued.The significance of such a system is not that it represents the national norm. It shows what has to happen for a performance requirement to move beyond a design document: someone has to verify it at the construction site.
But compliance does not end at the occupancy certificate
The weakest link is what happens once the building is occupied.A building can satisfy a design requirement and still consume more energy than anticipated because of construction quality, equipment performance, controls, maintenance or the way the building is actually operated. This is where commissioning becomes important. Commissioning checks whether building systems have been installed and are operating according to their intended design before the building is fully handed over and occupied.India does not yet have mandatory whole-building or component-level commissioning protocols across the building stock.There is a second problem: measurement after occupancy.India lacks a consistent national system for collecting and comparing building-level operational performance. The Indian Institute for Human Settlements' 2025 assessment identifies gaps in standardised metrics and consistent post-occupancy performance data. Without that information, it becomes difficult to establish whether buildings that complied during design and construction continue to deliver the expected performance once occupied.An Energy Performance Index (EPI), which measures annual energy consumption relative to floor area, provides one way of comparing operational performance. But the absence of a mandatory EPI framework covering all buildings limits its use as a national accountability mechanism.This leaves a gap in the regulatory chain: code-approval- construction - occupancy.The final step is not yet integrated consistently into that chain.
Why this matters for the 2070 building stock
The 86% figure changes the policy calculation. India is not trying to retrofit an already-complete building stock; it still has the opportunity to influence the majority of the buildings that will exist in 2070 before they are constructed.That applies to both operational and embodied carbon. Operational decisions affect how much electricity a building will consume throughout its life, particularly as cooling demand increases. Material choices made during construction determine a significant portion of a building's embodied emissions before it is even occupied. The 2024 ECSBC introduces voluntary embodied-carbon disclosure provisions, but a comprehensive mandatory framework has yet to become standard across the building stock.
The policy challenge, therefore, is not simply to produce a newer building code. It is to make the code enforceable, verifiable and measurable throughout the building's life.The next generation of India's building stock will be shaped by decisions made now: what standards states adopt, what municipalities put into their approval systems, who verifies the envelope and other performance requirements during construction, whether buildings are properly commissioned before handover, and whether their actual performance is measured after occupancy.With most of India's 2070 building stock still to be constructed, the window to influence that outcome remains open. The question is whether the regulatory system can keep pace with the construction it is meant to govern.
