The development of green building policy guidelines for Rajkot city under the "Building Efficiency Accelerator" partnership is progressing well. The initial draft of the guidelines was discussed with the concerned stakeholders during a workshop in Rajkot in March 2017. Since then, the team has been conducting one on one consultations with various experts and stakeholders in the field of building development within the region.

In this regard, Prof. Sha Yu from PNNL, who is an expert on Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC), met with the Rajkot Municipal Commissioner, Mr. Pani, along with other city staff to understand Rajkot’s needs, as well as to outline strategies which could scale up efforts in building energy efficiency.

The inputs sought were mainly to identify locally implementable measures, incentives/disincentives, operational and institutional mechanisms and most importantly, the measurement, review and verification (MRV) process. All of these will be incorporated in the final guidelines document to be published by Rajkot Municipality. Additionally, a set of green building assessment criteria has been developed which are based on local environmental issues along with a checklist of measures aimed at architects, builders, financial institutions, and homeowners. Designed to serve as a performance assessment tool, the policy guidelines will help quantify the environmental achievement of a building and provide a meaningful differentiation of buildings in the market place.

Besides this, the Rajkot Municipal Corporation has also identified options to implement pilot interventions in the building sector as part of this partnership which includes, construction of a central zone building of the corporation, and an upcoming state of the art library.