Brij Kothari, Ph.D.

Brij Kothari is on the faculty of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and the founder of PlanetRead and BookBox, committed to scalable solutions for reading literacy in a diversity of languages. In 1996, he conceived Same Language Subtitling (SLS) on mainstream TV for mass reading. Bill Clinton called SLS, “A small thing that has a staggering impact on people’s lives.” Following 2+ decades of research, pilots, and advocacy, SLS became India’s national broadcast policy in 2019. Currently, Brij is leading the implementation of that policy under the ‘Billion Readers’ initiative. He is the recipient of the International Literacy Prize from the Library of Congress and has a Ph.D. from Cornell.