Aamir Khan

Aamir Khan is an Indian actor and film-maker who, from the mid-2000s, turned a substantial part of his public life towards social causes — first as a supporter of protest movements, then as the presenter of a television series about India's social problems, and finally as the co-founder of Paani Foundation, which works on drought prevention in Maharashtra.

His first prominent intervention came in April 2006, when he joined demonstrations by the Narmada Bachao Andolan against the Gujarat government's decision to raise the height of the Narmada dam, speaking for the adivasi families who stood to be displaced. The stance drew protests against his film Fanaa and a partial ban on it in Gujarat, and a public defence of his right to speak from the then Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. He later backed the Jan Lokpal anti-corruption campaign led by Anna Hazare in 2011, and in July 2012 met the Prime Minister and the minister for social justice and empowerment to press for the eradication of manual scavenging.

The television series Satyamev Jayate, which Khan presented from 2012, examined subjects ranging from female foeticide to caste and, in the twelfth episode of its first season, water scarcity. When the series finished its run in November 2014, Khan and its director Satyajit Bhatkal decided to commit themselves to a single problem for several years rather than move on. They spent more than a year studying rural Maharashtra's chronic water shortage before setting up Paani Foundation in 2016 with Kiran Rao and Reena Dutta, with Bhatkal as chief executive. Its central instrument is the Satyamev Jayate Water Cup, a competition in which villages are trained in watershed development and then given roughly 45 days before the monsoon to build as much rainwater storage capacity as they can. The contest began in three talukas covering 116 villages; by 2018 it involved 4,032 villages across 75 drought-hit tehsils in four regions of the state. Khan himself takes part in shramdaan, the voluntary manual labour the campaign is built on, and has asked the public to join as Jal Mitras.

He was appointed UNICEF's national brand ambassador for child nutrition in November 2011 and its Goodwill Ambassador for South Asia in October 2014, and has taken part in government information campaigns on malnutrition.[2][3]