Growing up in a business family in Pune, Ankita Shroff Sarda used to tease her older sister, Pranati Shroff Munot, about the names she saw in Indian corporate life. There were Tata Sons and Kirloskar Brothers, she would say, but where were the women-led equivalents? Why couldn’t there one day be “the Shroff sisters”?

Two decades on, that throwaway childhood line has turned into a concise summary of where the sisters now stand: at the helm of Sustain and Save, an environmental consultancy focused on the built environment, and at the centre of a local story about women breaking into a male-dominated, high-emissions sector.

Dr. Ganesh Natarajan, Namrata Dhamankar , Ankita Sarda and Pranati Munot. Photo: The Indian Express

Their firm advises developers, manufacturers and asset owners on green building certification, life-cycle analysis, environmental product declarations and carbon footprint analysis, positioning itself as a specialist in helping buildings and products align with net-zero ambitions.

From family business roots to a sustainability-first venture

Both sisters arrived at sustainability from different directions. Pranati, an architect by training, spent more than a decade working in green building design and consultancy before folding that experience into Sustain and Save.

Ankita took a more entrepreneurial route: a background in engineering and an MBA, followed by the launch and sale of a chemical-sector startup in 2019. That exit gave her both capital and conviction to focus full-time on climate-related work.

Both women also share an international layer to their story. They completed fellowships in sustainable business and responsible leadership at the Swedish Institute, programmes that exposed them to Scandinavian models of climate policy and corporate governance and, by their own account, convinced them to work exclusively on sustainability.

Their timing was early. As Ankita and Pranati were building their careers, climate risk remained a relatively niche concern in Indian real estate and construction. Today, that context has shifted dramatically. After the pandemic, they say, both developers and end users have become more conscious of air quality, resource use and operating costs, while governments have moved ahead with new regulations and standards.

A consultancy built around the climate cost of buildings

The buildings and construction sector is now one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for an estimated 37 per cent of global emissions. Sustain and Save is designed to sit directly inside that problem.

The firm describes itself as a premier environmental consultancy for the built environment, with more than 15 years of cumulative experience across green building certifications, life-cycle analysis, environmental product declarations and carbon accounting. Under the leadership of founder and CEO Pranati Shroff Munot, co-founder and CFO Ankita Shroff Sarda and COO Namrata Dhamankar, it aims to be a trusted partner for companies trying to embed sustainability into core operations rather than treat it as a side project.

That mandate is expressed through three broad lenses: projects, products and people. On the project side, the firm supports green building certifications and advises on design choices that reduce energy, water and materials use. On the product side, it helps manufacturers quantify the environmental impact of materials and systems across their life cycle, often with an eye to export markets and ESG reporting. On the people side, it runs training and advocacy efforts intended to build sustainability literacy inside client organisations.

Staq: turning certification pain points into a platform

The sisters’ most recent move has been to translate those advisory lessons into software. Over the course of 2025, Sustain and Save test-drove an in-house platform called Staq, designed to simplify a process that both developers and consultants routinely describe as painful: aggregating the documents and data required to determine whether a building qualifies as “green”.

The platform, formally launched in the final quarter of the year, allows project teams to upload plans, photographs and performance data, and then uses that input to assess whether a site is meeting various safety, efficiency and sustainability benchmarks. A real-time dashboard gives executives and project managers visibility on metrics such as energy consumption and savings, wherever they are based.

Reporting on the startup notes that Staq was initially tested with around 150 clients across Maharashtra and Gujarat, many of whom had previously relied on Sustain and Save for manual calculations. The platform now accommodates dozens of certification parameters and hundreds of data points, while also acting as a directory of vetted green materials and products. The business model is software-as-a-service: instead of paying for consulting hours, developers pay an annual fee to use the platform.

In parallel, Sustain and Save continues to present Staq as part of a broader push to make sustainability “effortless, profitable and strategic” for clients – a way of integrating compliance, performance tracking and net-zero planning into one workflow rather than a series of ad hoc exercises.

Complementary skills at the top

Part of the appeal of the Shroff story, especially in local coverage, lies in its family-business twist. One sister is the technical specialist, the other is more focused on finance and growth. In their own telling, that division of labour is less about stereotype than about practicality: one keeps an eye on design standards and certification rules; the other worries about funding, pricing and scale.

They are open about the fact that the dynamics are not always tidy. Interviews and profiles describe early-morning calls, long to-do lists and the occasional argument. But they also point to a shared ambition: to prove that a women-led, sustainability-first business can reshape how a high-emissions sector operates without sacrificing commercial discipline.

Heading into 2026, the target they have set for themselves is straightforward: at least 200 projects live on Staq as an initial base for expansion.

For now, the Shroff sisters’ story is rooted in Pune and western India. But the combination of sector focus, software and climate urgency gives it a relevance that travels well beyond one city – a reminder that some of the most consequential shifts in the net-zero transition may come not from headline-grabbing megaprojects, but from founders who quietly rewire the everyday systems of how buildings are designed, documented and delivered.