Bollywood Star Wants to “Light a Billion Lives”

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

If you’re not among the hundreds of millions of Bollywood fans, you may not recognize the young woman in the picture. But 24-year-old Asin Thottumkal is immediately recognizable to Hindi or Tamil speaking populations around the world.

Asin has been in nearly two-dozen films, including, most recently, London Dreams. Advertisements featuring Asin have also done their part to make hers one of the more recognizable faces in India. She currently represents companies such as Tata Sky (satellite TV), Clinic All Clear (shampoo) a division of Pepsi Foods, and others.

Recently, Asin has lent her image and voice to a different form of advocacy: supporting solar power in mostly poor, rural areas of India and Africa.

Asin appeared with R.K. Pachauri, the chair of the UN organization, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to endorse “Lighting a Billion Lives,” a program to bring solar powered lanterns to 200 million households with no electricity.

The program is so important in part because of what it replaces – kerosene lanterns which pollute the air with greenhouse gases and cause severe respiratory problems for millions of families.

“I feel what President Obama so eloquently described as the audacity of hope,” Asin told a crowd at a reception for the organization. That hope was given a lift earlier today when US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, speaking at the Climate Summit in Copenhagen announced US plans to provide $35 million over five years to groups helping to spread solar technology to developing nations. One of the recipients named was “Lighting a Billion Lives.”

One expert I talked with today had mixed feelings about Chu’s announcement.

Katherine Lucey is the founder and executive director of Solar Sister, a non-profit working exclusively on the issue of helping women in rural Africa escape “energy poverty” by making solar technology, such as small LED lanterns, available. Lucey called the US plan, “a tiny step.”

“The US can and should be committing more resources…to the dissemination of clean energy technologies,” she said.

You can learn more about Lighting a Billion Lives, here.

For information on Solar Sister, go here, or follow @solarafrica on twitter.

And to learn more about Asin Thottumkal, visit her website.