Bollywood, the world's biggest film industry, has hundreds of millions of illiterate fans. Brij Kothari of PlanetRead and BookBox saw this as an opportunity to improve lives through a technique called same-language subtitling (SLS). Unlike traditional subtitling, which gives a native translation to foreign-produced entertainment, same language subtitling shows the written representation of the words being spoken. This provides built-in literacy education by showing how spoken words are written.

Despite qualitative and quantitative research demonstrating the success of this technique, there was still a years-long struggle to get it implemented for Indian TV broadcasts. In this interview with host Sheela Sethuraman, Kothari outlines the strategies he used to overcome media, educational, and policy objections. His program now provides subtitling at no charge to 10 TV stations that cover almost all of India. Future goals for this project include making it a broadcasting standard in India and spreading it to other countries with popular music videos and illiteracy, such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, and east African countries like Kenya.

His other venture is different but shares similar goals. BookBox aims to create books tailored to different reading levels that are distributed on different platforms -- VCD, broadcast TV, mobile phones, and printed books. Partnerships with TV stations to create television programming will pay for the distribution of physical books and provide similar benefits as same language subtitling. The goal is to have 3-4 new TV programs a week, translate them into 5-10 languages, and provide reading practice for over 120 million children.