Indian social entrepreneur

Brij Kothari (born 9 June 1964) is an Indian academic and a social entrepreneur. He invented Same Language Sub*ling on TV for m* literacy in India.

Contents

• 1 Early life
• 2 Career
  • 2.1 Same-Language Sub*ling
• 3 Personal life
• 4 Awards
• 5 References

Early life

Brij Kothari was born to a business entrepreneur. His parents were particular about education and sent him to Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (SAICE) in Pondicherry. He is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur, and did his Ph.D. from Cornell University. He is a Schwab Social Entrepreneur and an Ashoka Fellow. He was a fellow at Stanford University's Reuters Digital Vision Program and completed the "Leadership for System Change: Delivering Social Impact at Scale" program at Harvard University.

Career

After completion of his academic pursuits Kothari returned to India. In 1996 he joined the faculty of the Indian Ins*ute of Management in Ahmedabad. While continuing to teach communication to MBA students, he started work on SLS at IIM. He has been on the Faculty of IIM Ahmedabad, as *ociate and Adjunct Professor, since 1996.

Same-Language Sub*ling

In 1999, in an effort to improve functional literacy rates in India, he experimented with sub*les on Chitrageet, a Gujarati television program. In 2002, the Doordarshan network sub*led their national program Chitrahaar. Since 2006, SLS has been implemented on one weekly program each in Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Marathi. The main goal is to persuade broadcasting policy in India to implement SLS on all songs on TV, in all languages.

Kothari is the president of PlanetRead, a non-profit involved in furthering Same Language Sub*ling throughout the world. He is also the founder of BookBox, a social venture funded by First Light Ventures that produces animated, read-along stories for children in languages such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, Hindi, and over 21 others.

His work was also selected by the Google.org as one of the projects for funding.

Personal life

Brij Kothari is married. He has two sons and a daughter.

Awards

• iF Social Impact Prize, 2017
• Library of Congress, International Literacy Prize, 2013
• USAID, Winner, All Children Reading Grand Challenge, 2012
• N*COM, Social Innovation Honour, 2011
• Indian Social Entrepreneur of the Year, 2009, Schwab Foundation and UNDP
• Clinton Global Initiative, 2009 and 2011, Feature
• Ashoka Fellow, 2004,
• Tech Laureate (Education), The Tech Awards – 2003
• Winner, Development Marketplace, Global innovation compe*ion – World Bank, 2002

References