Background
Brij Kothari was born to a business entrepreneur.
Brij Kothari was born to a business entrepreneur.
He is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur, and did his Doctor of Philosophy from Cornell University. While continuing to teach communication to Master of Business Administration students, he started work on SLS at Indian Institutes of Management.
He invented Same Language Subtitling on television for mass literacy in India. He is a Schwab Social Entrepreneur, an Ashoka Fellow and a Stanford/Reuters Digital Vision Fellow. After completion of his academic pursuits Kothari returned to India.
In 1996 he joined the faculty of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.
He has been on the Faculty of Indian Institutes of Management Ahmedabad, as Associate and Adjunct Professor, since 1996. Same-Language Subtitling
In 1999, in an effort to improve functional literacy rates in India, he experimented with subtitles on Chitrageet, a Gujarati television program
In 2002, the Doordarshan network subtitled 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 television, in all languages.
Kothari is the president of PlanetRead, a non-profit involved in furthering Same Language Subtitling throughout the world. His work was also selected by the Google.org as one of the projects for funding.