Growing up in a business family, Ankita Shroff Sarda would ask her older sister Pranati Shroff Munot, “Why do we have Tata Sons and Kirloskar Brothers but so few women leaders making waves in any industry? Why can’t we have the Shrff sisters?”
As 2025 comes to a close, the sisters can look back at their childhood prattle with fondness. The Shroff sisters, along with Namrata Dhamankar, have been working on sustainable practices in the built environment for more than 15 years.
They are now founders and leaders of an environmental consultancy firm, Sustain and Save. The firm offers services, such as green building certification, life cycle analysis, environmental product declaration and carbon footprint analysis.
Pranati, an architect, is a green building consultant who had another startup that has been merged into Sustain and Save. Ankita, an engineer with an MBA, founded a chemical startup and sold it in 2019. Both have a fellowship in sustainable businesses and responsible leadership from the Swedish Institute under their belts.
“Inspired by the Swedish sustainability story, we wanted to make an impact and work purely on Sustainability,” says Pranati. People have asked us if we wanted to carry the family legacy, but building something along with it gives us more of a fire in the belly,” says Ankita.
Significantly, the sisters entered the field when there was little concern about climate change. “We noticed that, after Covid, people have become really conscious, from the developers to the consumers. The government, too, is implementing several laws,” says Pranati.
Ensuring compliance
The construction industry is expanding across the country, as Pune is only too aware. The United Nations Environment Programme says that “the buildings and construction sector is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for a staggering 37 per cent of global emissions”.
Sustain and Save spent much of 2025 test-driving an innovative technology. Two months ago, they launched the platform, Staq, to solve the incessant problem in the real estate industry: mounds of paperwork and the need to collect documents and data before one can begin calculating whether a project is green.
On the app, one can upload photos and other data to get an assessment of whether the project is meeting safety compliance or site efficiency regulations, among others. “There is real-time monitoring of the progress of the site. Among the features is that one can capture data, get a dashboard that allows a CEO or project manager, wherever in the world they are sitting, to get an update, whether it is about the consumption of energy or its savings,” says Dhamankar.
The app focuses on ensuring that, from the inception of a project through its completion and into its operations, the entire life cycle can be monitored. A builder or any other authority can understand the total savings or consumptions at different levels.
“What we realise is that everybody wants to go the sustainable way but don’t always have the knowledge about what is the green quotient,” says Pranati.
“If a builder is working on a sewage treatment Plant, they need to know how much water will be recycled in the particular society, how much energy will be saved by bringing in renewable energy to the project, or what must be done to reduce waste or recycle waste on site.”
Complementing each other
While Pranati is technically sound, Ankita is good with numbers. “It feels great to be heading a startup together. This was our dream,” says Pranati.
They talk business, thinking about how to grow and be better together. Pranati will wake Ankita up at 5 am with a list of things still left to do.
“We complement each other very well. Obviously, we have our fights. It’s very normal,” says Ankita. Heading into the new year, Pranati says, “Our target is to have 200 projects on the platform as a starting point for 2026.”
Dr. Ganesh Natarajan, Namrata Dhamankar , Ankita Sarda and Pranati Munot 
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