Blip

BLIP IN THE CONCRETE JUNGLE Pollution stops at the door of Kamal Meattle’s ecofriendly office hotel Business Standard

Sunday May 9, 1998

Nehru Place wasn't designed to inspire lyrical poetry- in fact it would have made Panditji with his love of nature blench. Grey concrete boxes dominate the skyline amidst the stink of over flowing sewage to the right, the Park Royale hotel presides over the potholes at the left, and soaring in the distance, you see the lotus temple – a humped, chalk-white structure looming like some insectivore, with the open top as if designed to such in all the South Delhi's pollutants.

Kamal Meattle spends a lot of time looking at the urban wilderness and tracking those noxious substances. He has to, in his avatar as director of the ‘office hotel’ at Paharpur Business Centre (PBC), one of the Grey Nehru Place boxes. Keeping count of ambient benzene, carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and other refugees from a lab is part of his daily toil.

In 1970, the Calcutta-based Paharpur group bought the Nehru Place land for Rs. 1 lakh. Five years ago; as the foundations of the PBC was being laid, Meattle launched a multi-pronged campaign to give his future clients the best of environments. Apart from the dozes of "non-mission critical services" it planned to provide to MNCs clients, Meattle strove to provide clean air inside and a clean environment outside the building.

Bang in front of the PBC is the NP Greens – a sprawling 40,000 square feet MCD part – that used to be host of over 150 slum dwellers once. Today, barring "six powerful" slummers. Meattle has induced the rest to leave. How did he do it? By providing a generous mixture of carrot and stick. "You have to be a constant irritant – like a mosquito – to illegal squatters, and eventually they will leave. The carrot-stick policy worked".

Then, after the squatters left, he removed 13 trucks of garbage, fogged the area against insects and started to revive the greens. Five years and Rs. 1.5 core later, he can sit at his fourth-floor window in the seven-storied centre and gaze at 40,000 sq. feet of grass and trees. Sometime ago, the government formally made PBC the park's maintenance-in-charge. "The last slummers (except the six) left a year ago. Overnight, e planted 200 trees, " says Manojit Jha, who looks after the greens which have "off limits" signs every 200 feet.

Some might classify this as a typical case of Robber Baronitis, yet others hail him as Delhi's "Operation Sunshine" boy. Meattle is steadfast when it comes to environmental cleanliness. It's built into the PBC USP: to deliver the best facilities to the 16 companies that operate from here, including Microsoft, Intel India, British Telecom, National Grid Company, Sony, International Generating Company, Matsushita and Singapore Telecom.

PBC does provide normal business service – trained office personnel, state-of-the art infrastructure, housekeeping, tours and travel, real estate database, food & beverage and other value-added services. But it doesn't stop there- clean air and a safe environment is part of the deal.

"State-of-the-art filtration systems are being put in place to make the place 99 per cent free of pollutants and make the indoor environment as good as a clean beach, "says S L Jindal, deputy general manager, projects. This June, they hope to get its environmental management system certified under ISO 14001, to become the first service industry firm in the India and the first Delhi-based company to achieve that rating.

Every little detail is obsessively looked into. "What we are doing here is first tackling the pollution creating sources, "says Meattle. Smokers must take their breaks outside. Food & soft drinks can only be consumed in open-air terrace café or in the ground floor restaurant. The front entrance is a double door insulated with an invisible air curtain in between. A visitor is greeted with a blast of air strategically directed at the shoes before the main door swings open. You don't just wipe your feet on the mat at PBC, you glow-dry them.

Moppers and detergents are closely monitored, and only water-based paint is used inside the all-wood building. Woollen, not synthetic, carpet covers 80 per cent of the green marble floor space. High absorbency tissue rolls are used to avoid wastage, only CFL (condensed fluorescent lamps) are plugged in to save electricity, natural fabric. "With a small percentage of synthetics for strength" is used to drape chairs.

In addition, a "Treated Fresh Air" unit with a built-in energy recovery device has been installed for the 100 per cent airtight building. It does the job of washing, filtering and dehydrating the air outside before being pumped in. So far, only some five-star hotels and a few individual offices have put such a system in place. The operating theatre of Ganga Ram Hospital has one too.

The cost of living in this purified-to-the-last-detail environment doesn't come cheap at the whopping Rs. 40000 to Rs. 60000 per person per month! PBC has adopted a hotel-style billing system for its client's only it counts workstations rather than beds. And housekeeping is just as all encompassing. "We donut want our clients to worry about hiring manpower, telephone lines and travelling in or outside the city," says, Meattle. Like any hotel, there are fire exit maps in every room. And the towels are disinfected.

Unlike a hotel, the PBC does get weekends to fine-tune the details. Come Saturday, as the office closes for the weekend, the 150 =strong staff goes into over-drive. The leafy trees at the park are pressure sprayed with water, which "cost the company Rs. 24 lakhs a year along", estimates Meattle. The carpets are vacuumed, dustbins are washed, tables are polished, brass is shined, white cutting energy costs by operating only one lift.

Meattle tried his hand at several things before he became head honcho at PBC. After graduating from MIT as a chemical engineer, he went to work for US publishers Doubleday. This was followed by exporting perfumery chemicals and stint at Standipack, an associate company of mother firm Paharpur Cooling towers founded by father-in-law M Swaroop Standipack makes environmentally-friendly flexible packaging for lubricating oils and holds several international patents.

Recently, he got a court order preventing Castrol Indian from design patented by Standipack. His next crusade is against sellers of spurious vehicle oils, and he’s thinking about filing a "friendly suit" against the government.

The green lung venture is not his first brush with activism. The origins lie in the "Save the Trees" compaign that stopped felling of trees in Himachal Pradesh in 1985. ‘We have to act as a catalyst. It is a way of telling the government don’t go to sleep."

It isn’t just air quality be is engrossed in. Touch on energy-saving methods and Meattle can rattle on for 10 minutes without stopping to inhale his own purified air. "Here we don’t overdo the indoor temperature. In five-star hotels the temperature is kept 2-3 degrees lower, which makes you feel good but is unnecessary. It just eats into the generation costs. We monitor electricity usage and judicious use of lifts is encouraged. Carbon dioxide , sulphur dioxide and SPM (suspended particulate matter) meters will be installed this month. This way we make less demands on Delhi’s resources and set an example."

All the canteen waste goes into the 200-feet long vermiculture pit in the park. To ensure water conservation. (vital in the part of South Delhi as any Alaknanda or Greater Kailash residents will testify). PBC has installed electronic flushes. Bottles are resoled, the paper is recycled. The plants watered by an automatic drip-system, which is connected to an overhead water tank with remixed fertiliser.

The sense of pride among the staff is palpable – the 50-grey and white uniformers as well as the 100-odd executives.

"There was a time you felt proud to say you were smoking. Not anymore. There is stigma attached to it now, "says Jindal, an ex-smoker. And a Meattle can testify it’s small changes like these that bring the bigger picture into focus.