Indrajit Banerjee

Indrajit Banerjee (10 November 1964 – 25 January 2019) was an author on media and communication and the director of the Knowledge Societies Division at UNESCO.

He obtained a PhD with distinction from Sorbonne University Paris in communication and didactics in 1994. He served as the secretary-general of the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC) in Singapore, from 2004 to 2009.

Education and career Indrajit Banerjee was born and brought up in Pondicherry, India. His early schooling was completed at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, where he left with a BA in Arts and Sciences in 1985. He moved to New Delhi, attending Jawaharlal Nehru University where, in 1988, he left with a MA in French. He then moved to Paris, France, where he completed a Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies by 1990, followed by a PhD in communication and in didactics from the Sorbonne University in 1994. As director, Banerjee's work was geared towards improving freedom of expression, access to information and education, and other themes aligned to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. His work towards the SDGs saw contributions in the area of inclusivity and providing access for people with disabilities, culminating in various projects and events, such as the 2017 True Colours Festival for Artistes with Disabilities featuring advocate Stephen Hawking.

From 2017 onwards, Banerjee also oversaw collaboration of UNESCO with Inria for the Software Heritage project with the aim of "collecting, preserving, and sharing the source code of all the software ever written."

He was the recipient of the CIONET European Digital Leader of the Year award in 2017.

He was a member of the International Communication Association, the International Association for Media and Communication Research and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.