Light up a hundred villages, the Bollywood way

By Shilpa Jamkhandikar

MUMBAI, India (Reuters Life!) - Bollywood stars are teaming up with a renowned climate change scientist to help brighten the lives of a billion people through a project that aims to provide 200,000 villages with electricity for the first time.

Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan and others from the Indian film industry will help raise money for the "Lighting a Billion Lives" campaign through proceeds of their "Unforgettable" concert tour of North America and Europe.

"The Indian film industry, and in particular Mr Bachchan, has a massive fan following and their involvement in such causes can be a powerful instrument for social transformation," Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told Reuters in an email.

Revenues from the Bollywood tour, which starts in Toronto this Friday, would help provide electric lanterns to some 100 villages, he added.

By February, the campaign, an initiative of The Energy and Resources Institute which Pachauri heads, aims to replace hazardous kerosene and paraffin lanterns with solar-powered devices in 200,000 villages in India, Pakistan, Maldives, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Ghana, Malawi and Cambodia.

"This will facilitate education of children; provide better illumination and a kerosene-smoke-free indoor environment," the campaign website (labl.teriin.org/) said.

Pachauri, whose panel shared the Nobel peace prize last year with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, said at least 1.6 billion people worldwide do not have access to electricity, and that 25 percent of them were in India.

For Bollywood stars such as Preity Zinta, contributing to the campaign is one of the perks of being a celebrity.