Smart Green Summit & Awards

Showcasing Sustainable Living

The Economic Times & Saint-Gobain fast forwarded the mandate of creating tomorrow's sustainable living spaces at the 2nd edition of Smart Green Summit & Awards in Mumbai.

Smart Green Summit & Awards, a mega-event held on 16 Dec 2016 in Mumbai, saw discussions, panels, and exhibitions by key stakeholders, leaders and bureaucrats in the industry. Today, sustainability focuses not only on the growing need of eco-friendly built environments but also on intelligently using and re-using of the resources available. The key speaker at the event, Ken Yeang, Senior Principal and Founder, T.R. Hamzah & Yeang Sdn Bhd, said: "I see great design as the integration of ecostructure; this involves nature, humans, water, and the built environment. And so great design involves all of this. We have no time to lose. What becomes of nature and everything organic? We need to see how we can emulate nature and bring it into our built environment so that we can give back to nature what we have taken from it."


Participants discussed how sustainable practices worldwide are being integrated through innovating and evolving conventional practices and defining the path forward towards achieving world-class status in environmental sustainability. James Law, Chairman & CEO & Chief Cybertect, James Law Cybertecture, eloberated: "We must bear in mind that as people come together to live, we need to create better cities. Through eons we have always had a fight between the built and the natural. This dichotomy exists even today, and we have to bring a flavor of this to the lives of those living in our new-born cities."

Technology is here to help us, provided we are willing to use it for citizens' advantage. Governance plays a key role in this, and none of the pieces of a smart city can work in isolation.Ajay Pandey, Managing Director & Group CEO, GIFT City, quoted: "The key to success lies in creating an integrated solution for the citizen. What is important is urban governance, even more so than the bells and whistles of technology. Enabling governing provisions can ease the common citizen's life."


Dia Mirza, sharing a perspective on sustainability, added: " India has the second largest population on the planet that is fighting for space on 7 percent of the land on this planet. And in that 7 percent, we need to find a way to exist with our forests, the species that keep these forests alive. We must learn to co-exist with this biodiversity because all of our progress will be pointless if we don't have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink in the next 20 years."

Being sustainable can be accelerated by good use of Smart technology. R Subramanian, Managing Director, Glass and Solutions in India-Glass Business, Saint-Gobain, said, "Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. Sustainability is that idea, and the Smart Green Summit is the way through which we reaffirm our commitment to greater sustainability."

Deepak Lamba, President, Times Statergy Solutions, shared his view on going green and following the sustainable pathway into the future, and added that India, being a world leader in frugal innovation, can easily spark eco-friendly and sustainable solutions. Optimsim is the key and it is essential to strike a balance between human development and environmental sustainability.

The Economic Times Smart Green Summit & Awards also felicitated the best brands of innovation & sustainability. Brands included GIBSS, CCBA Designs for Forbes Marshall Green Field, INI Design Studio for JSW Center& JMA Design Co. for The Perch, amongst others.

Saint-Gobain designs, manufactures, and distributes materials and solutions that provide comfort, performance, and safety while addressing the challenges of sustainable construction, resource efficiency and climate change. Times Conferences Ltd., functional under the brand name ET Edge, is an Economic Times initiative. It seeks to empower multiple industries and segments by sharing critical business knowledge, and strives to bring together key leaders on its knowledge platforms to create social and business ecology conducive to the positive changes required by the industry.