Pachauri being felicitated at a function at Rabindra Bhawan in Guwahati on Tuesday. (PTI)

Guwahati, March 4: When Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, Nobel Peace Prize winner of 2007 on climate change, gave away a solar lantern to Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi today, he was highlighting a problem which the state is acutely facing — a large number of unelectrified homes.

Pachauri, also the director general of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), asked Gogoi to be a part of the “lighting a million lives campaign” through which solar lighting devices are being propagated as it provides a smoke free environment.

“You can keep it in your room,” Pachauri told Gogoi after presenting him a solar lantern, a solar torch and a photovoltaic device.

The campaign targets to bring light into the lives of one million rural people in India by replacing kerosene lanterns with solar lighting devices. It will facilitate education of children, provide better illumination and kerosene smoke free indoor environment for women to do household chores besides providing opportunities for livelihoods both at the individual and village levels. Pachauri, also the chairman of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, got the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Al Gore.

The solar lighting devices were given at a workshop on Biodiesel: Towards Energy Security at the Assam Administrative Staff College today. Pachauri said the Northeast was a storehouse of biofuels and biomass resources and could help the country enormously. On climate change, he said: “Assam is the neighbour of a vulnerable region, Bangladesh, which is prone to cyclones. Natural resources in the Northeast are still by and large intact and steps should be taken to protect them from exploitation.”

“The Northeast has scientific and technical capability to tackle the problem,” he said, adding that TERI will provide all necessary help.

At the launch of the department of biotechnology’s natural awareness clubs for Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura, Pachauri said it was a pity that the people in the country were still not drawn to science.

Altogether 15 schools from Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura are participating in the programme which aims to enhance understanding among students about the immense value of biological diversity of the country, the importance of locally available bio resources and their sustainable use and conservation.

The target group is students from Class VI to Class VIII and Class IX to Class XII. Pachauri was later felicitated at Rabindra Bhavan by Gogoi.