Global film star Alia Bhatt is turning the spotlight on conservation
Inside the actress's efforts to leverage a wide variety of tools to help an even wider variety of protective efforts.
Alia Bhatt grew up in Mumbai surrounded by animals, in large part because her sister Shaheen wouldn’t stop bringing home stray kittens. There are millions in India, and they often arrived at the Bhatt household in terrible condition, starving or with infections. At one point their mother attempted to stop the parade of ailing kittens, so the girls would smuggle their patients into their room and hide them there as they convalesced. “It was compulsive, almost,” Bhatt says. “My heart opened up very young.”
That love of animals would stay with her into adulthood. Today, as one of India’s most recognizable actresses—with almost 90 million Instagram followers—she is using her massive reach to highlight animal and environmental welfare through film projects, a series of children’s books for the next generation, and campaigns to take action. “I was in this position where I started to question whether my voice had quality,” she says. “I said, OK, let me go to something that I feel very passionate about. And that is animals.”
Bhatt’s tactics are creative, varied, sometimes even catcentric. Eternal Sunshine, the production company she founded in 2021, has a logo featuring two cats. Bhatt was an executive producer on Poacher, the 2024 hit miniseries based on a real elephant poaching investigation in India. Eternal Sunshine also has partnered with the eco-film festival All Living Things to encourage filmmakers to turn their lens on the environment. “Stories have such an amazing way to impact our minds,” Bhatt says. “Once you tell a story, it’s there forever.”
Stories can have an especially profound impact on children, and Bhatt is authoring a series of children’s books, The Adventures of Ed-a-Mamma, about a girl named Alia and her adopted dog, Ed, who go on adventures to help animals; the first book is called Ed Finds a Home. (This effort builds on her successful sustainable children’s clothing and product label, also called Ed-a-Mamma.) Kids have a natural excitement about animals, Bhatt said, describing how her young daughter, Raha, points out every dog when they’re on drives. She hopes to help children hold on to that enthusiasm, as she has.
Another inventive initiative: Mi Wardrobe Is Su Wardrobe, or MiSu, a concept where Bhatt sells her clothes and those of other celebrities on the resale platform Dolce Vee to extend the shelf life of garments, thereby reducing landfill waste and helping “the wider ecosystem of circular fashion in India thrive,” says Dolce Vee founder Komal Hiranandani. In doing so, Bhatt is also channeling funds into a constellation of charities, with proceeds benefiting organizations like the Bombay Natural History Society, a nature conservancy.
When she doesn’t contribute funding, Bhatt contributes visibility through Coexist, the online platform she launched almost a decade ago to amplify the efforts of eco-friendly companies and charities.
Bhatt does not claim expertise in the many issues she champions. “By normalizing learning, questioning, and gradual change, she makes conservation and sustainability feel approachable, accessible, and possible,” says Dorita D’Souza, who works with Bhatt on her philanthropic endeavors. Her contagious curiosity is a through line to all her initiatives. And it’s complemented by her compulsive empathy, undiluted since childhood.
