Thal Sena Bhawan

Syllabus subtopic: Various Security Forces and Agencies and their Mandate.

Prelims and Mains focus: on the details of the new structure and its significance; about GRIHA

News: Defence Minister performed the stone-laying ceremony for the proposed ‘Thal Sena Bhawan’ of the Army in the Delhi cantonment.

About Thal Sena Bhawan

• The building spread over 39 acres opposite Manekshaw centre in Delhi cantonment will bring together Army headquarters split into eight pockets across Delhi. Presently, the Army Headquarters is split into eight pockets across South Block, Sena Bhawan, Hutments Area, R.K. Puram, Shankar Vihar and other places, the Army said. The work was sanctioned to make up the existing deficiency of 44% and also to accommodate the Army Headquarters in one place.

• The ‘Thal Sena Bhawan’ is conceptualised as a multi-storey green building adopting Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment (GRIHA) norms and will house offices, a residential area for security personnel and basic amenities.

• Approximately 7.5 lakh sq.m. of the area will be constructed to house the office complex and parking. A total of 6,014 offices will be constructed, which will house offices for 1,684 officers — both military and civilian — and 4,330 sub-staff.

• It is proposed to construct this structure in five years. The Army chief would continue to sit in South Block in close proximity to the Defence Minister and the present Army HQ ‘Sena Bhawan’ will continue to exist, though some functions would be shifted to the new complex.

Significance

• The new structure will bring together various pockets of the Army headquarters spread across Delhi under one roof thereby improving the working efficiency while reducing the carbon footprint and logistics requirements. It would also allow more family time for all personnel at peace posting in Delhi.

• Earlier there was a movement of about 3,000-4,000 vehicles every day from the various Army establishments in the city. This would be not required once the ‘Thal Sena Bhawan’ comes up.

• The newly created Department of Military Affairs (DMA) headed by the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) will work from here. This will help in jointness.

About Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment (GRIHA)

• GRIHA is a rating tool that helps people assess the performance of their building against certain nationally acceptable benchmarks. It evaluates the environmental performance of a building holistically over its entire life cycle, thereby providing a definitive standard for what constitutes a ‘green building’. The rating system, based on accepted energy and environmental principles, will seek to strike a balance between the established practices and emerging concepts, both national and international.

• GRIHA attempts to minimize a building’s resource consumption, waste generation, and overall ecological impact within certain nationally acceptable limits/benchmarks. It attempts to quantify aspects such as energy consumption, waste generation, renewable energy adoption, etc. so as to manage, control and reduce the same to the best possible extent.

• With over two decades of experience in green and energy-efficient buildings, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) has developed GRIHA (Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment), which was adopted as the national rating system for green buildings by the Government of India in 2007.

• This tool has been adopted by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. This tool, by its qualitative and quantitative assessment criteria, is able to ‘rate’ a building on the degree of its ‘greenness’.