Brij Kothari - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Dr. Brij Kothari is an India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n academic and a social entrepreneur. He invented Same Language Subtitling

Same language subtitling

Same language subtitling refers to the practice of subtitling programs on TV in the same language as the audio. This method of subtitling is used by national television broadcasters in India such as Doordarshan...

on TV for mass literacy in India.

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

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

. He is a Schwab Social Entrepreneur, an Ashoka Fellow and a Stanford/Reuters Digital Vision Fellow.

Career

After completion of his academic pursuits Kothari returned to India. In 1996 he joined the faculty of the Indian Institute 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 Associate and Adjunct Professor, since 1996.

SLS

In 1999, in an effort to improve functional literacy rates in India, he experimented with subtitles on Chitrageet, a Gujarati

Gujarati language

Gujarati is an Indo-Aryan language, and part of the greater Indo-European language family. It is derived from a language called Old Gujarati which is the ancestor language of the modern Gujarati and Rajasthani languages...

television program. In 2002, the Doordarshan

DoorDarshan

Doordarshan is an Indian public service broadcaster, a division of Prasar Bharati. It is one of the largest broadcasting organizations in India in terms of the infrastructure of studios and transmitters. Recently, it has also started Digital Terrestrial Transmitters. On September 15, 2009,...

network subtitled their national program Chitrahaar

Chitrahaar

Chitrahaar is a television program on DD National, most widely watched in the 1970s. The word literally means 'a garland of pictures'. It airs for half an hour every Friday on prime-time where the videos of the latest songs in Hindi film music are televised...

. 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 immplement SLS on all songs on TV, in all languages.

Kothari is the president of PlanetRead, a non-profit involved in furthering Same Language Subtitling

Same language subtitling

throughout the world. He is also the founder of BookBox, a social venture 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

Google.org

Google.org is the charitable arm of Internet search engine company Google.The organization has committed over $100 million in investments and grants as of May 2010. To fund the organization, Google granted them 3 million shares during their initial public offering. As of August 2011, Google.org's 3...

as one of the projects for funding.

Awards

NASSCOM, Social Innovation Honour, 2011
Indian Social Entrepreneur of the Year, 2009, Schwab Foundation and UNDP
Clinton Global Initiative, 2009, Feature
Winner, Development Marketplace, Global innovation competition - World Bank
Tech Laureate (Education), The Tech Awards - 2003

External links

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