BOOKMARK Murky science of comfort part 4
".... the current [Indian] standard is still laced with glaring problems that are rooted in the global politics of comfort science and partially its own legacy. ..."
Six years after a study questioned the premise behind global thermal standards for buildings that people cannot get used to local environments, ASHRAE, the global body that sets the standards and sponsored the study decided to revise its standards, called Standard 55.
This study also proposed a reform which introduced comfort standards for non-air conditioned buildings in the West. Before this study, thermal standards for buildings were the same irrespective of whether a building was air conditioned or naturally ventilated. While these dual standards were new to the West, India had been practicing this for decades.
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However, India’s only thermal standards did not escape the influence of the study and its associated flaws.
Class bias in India’s National Building Code
In India, there is no dedicated thermal comfort standard unlike the West. What we have is the National Building Code (NBC) that defines thermal comfort requirement in a building. Set by the Bureau of Indian Standards, the code is different from standards set by ASHRAE or ISO as it main objective is to ensure safety, not comfort.
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Earlier versions of NBC had been silent on why they had different standards for building types (naturally ventilated and HVAC enabled), but a Freudian slip by authors of the 2016 NBC lay bare the classist nature of the division.
It says, “People living year-round in air-conditioned spaces are likely to develop high expectations for homogeneity and cool temperatures, and may become quite critical if thermal conditions deviate from the center of the comfort zone they have come to expect. In contrast, people who live or work in naturally ventilated buildings are able to control their immediate interior spaces, get accustomed to variable indoor thermal conditions that reflect local patterns of daily and seasonal climate changes.”
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