Short Profile of the Chief Guest, Professor Brij Kothari

Prof. Brij Kothari

Brij Kothari and his team have innovated, researched, and nationalized the use of 'Same language subtitling (SLS)' on Bollywood film songs on TV, for enhancing mass reading literacy in India. He laid the foundation for the SLS project as an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) in its Centre for Educational Innovation in 2002.

Brij is an Ashoka Fellow and the President of Planet Read, a non-profit involved in scaling SLS efforts in India and other countries. He is also the CEO of Book Box Inc, a for-profit social venture producing children’s animated stories in more than 25 languages. He co-founded Planet Read.org and BookBox.com as Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University.

Brij grew up in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry and went on to get a Masters in Physics at IIT Kanpur, a Masters in Development Communication and a Ph D in Education from Cornell University. His doctoral research was on conservation of local knowledge in Andean Ecuador.

Brij has now established Planet Read to spread his work across the globe. He has been working full time on making SLS a global phenomenon to achieve mass literacy in every region by subtitling the music of other countries.

He has received numerous awards like: