Brij Kothari leads the Billion Readers (BIRD) initiative nationally with a vision of achieving fluent reading skills at population scale. BIRD's mission is the quality implementation of Same Language Subtitling (SLS), its core innovation, on all mainstream entertainment content on TV, films, and streaming platforms, in all languages. In a country where a billion people watch 3-4 hours of TV every day, and where 600 million people are weak readers and 250 million are non-readers, SLS guarantees two hours of daily and lifelong reading practice to a billion+ consumers of video based entertainment.
Brij is a social entrepreneur (Ashoka and Schwab Fellow) who founded PlanetRead.org and BookBox.com. He conceived SLS for mass reading literacy in 1996 while pursuing a Ph.D. in Education at Cornell University. Since then, he has researched and pushed for SLS in national broadcast policy, on the faculty of IIM Ahmedabad (1996-2023), as a Stranford Digital Vision Fellow (2002-3), and is now leading BIRD at IIT-Delhi.
Brij is the recipient of the International Literacy Prize from the US Library of Congress and Co-Impact’s design and system change grants for BIRD. Besides scalable and cost-effective ICT solutions in education.
Brij's research interests include systems change dynamics, policy innovation and intrapreneurship, and evidence-based policymaking.