Kaun Banega Crorepati: Every Host, Season and Record Since 2000

KBC has had exactly two hosts in eighteen seasons. Amitabh Bachchan opened the show in 2000 and has hosted every season since, apart from a single interruption. Shah Rukh Khan hosted Season 3 alone, in 2007, after Bachchan’s Season 2 run had been cut short by illness the previous year and he did not return for the following season. Bachchan came back for Season 4 in 2010 and has not missed a season since — a run that, by Season 18, spans more than fifteen consecutive years and fourteen consecutive seasons with the same host, an unusual level of continuity for a prime-time format anywhere in the world.

That continuity is worth pausing on. Most long-running international quiz formats rotate hosts every few years as contracts lapse or ratings dip. KBC’s decision to rebuild its lifelines, its qualifying round and even its prize ladder almost every season, while keeping its host constant for all but one, suggests the production has treated Bachchan’s presence as the show’s actual format — the one element too costly to change — while treating everything else as negotiable.

When Amitabh Bachchan agreed to host KBC in 2000, Hindi television had never used a film star of his stature in a studio-based, unscripted format. His delivery set the template every season since has kept: an unhurried question read, a pause before “lock kiya jaye,” and a habit of drawing out a contestant’s own story — their job, their town, why the money mattered to them — before returning to the game. That combination of formality and warmth, more than any single format rule, is what separates KBC’s hot seat from a generic quiz-show podium.

The phrase most associated with him, “Computer ji, lock kiya jaye?” — addressed to the on-set answer-reveal system before locking in a contestant’s choice — has run continuously since Season 1 and is now legally recognised as part of his identity: in November 2022, the Delhi High Court granted Bachchan an injunction protecting his voice, image and this specific phrasing after scammers used them in fraudulent “KBC lottery” messages (see Records, below, and the FAQ for what to do if you receive one). Across eighteen seasons his on-air role has also expanded well beyond quizmaster — introducing “Dusra Mauka” contestants with their full backstory, hosting anniversary retrospectives like Season 16’s “Kahaani Jeet Ki,” and, in Season 18, explaining a new AI-assisted format (“Sochna Padega”) to an audience many of whom have watched him do this since childhood.

Season 3 exists because Amitabh Bachchan did not return after his illness-shortened Season 2. Shah Rukh Khan hosted the 2007 season on Star Plus — his only KBC season to date. It opened to a 12.33 TVR rating, against Season 2’s 19.75 TVR launch, and produced no crorepati winner across its 53 episodes, the only season in KBC’s history without one.

Show producer Siddharth Basu has spoken directly about why the season is remembered as an interlude rather than a new direction for the format: “What didn’t work with SRK was the comparison with AB. I think SRK did KBC in his own way with charm and wit, and as far as I know, it garnered good ratings.” That framing matters: Basu’s own account attributes the season’s muted legacy to an inevitable comparison with an established host, not to Khan’s performance on its own terms. Bachchan returned for Season 4 in 2010, once KBC had also moved networks, and the show has not changed hosts since.

• Season 1’s celebrity episodes (2000–01): Aamir Khan appeared as an early celebrity guest, winning ₹50 lakh; Rani Mukerji, Shah Rukh Khan and Anil Kapoor also played celebrity rounds during the launch season, years before Khan would host the show himself.
• The 2001 Gujarat earthquake relief special: Sachin Tendulkar and Madhuri Dixit each played a dedicated episode for ₹50 lakh, with winnings donated to earthquake relief — one of KBC’s earliest charity-format episodes.
• “Dusra Mauka” (2012–13): the Season 6 segment that gave contestants from disadvantaged backgrounds a seat advantage produced some of the show’s most-discussed episodes, including acid-attack survivor Sonali Mukherjee’s appearance alongside Lara Dutta.
• The Narula brothers’ ₹7 crore reaction (2014): Amitabh Bachchan’s on-air response to Achin and Sarthak Narula’s record win was widely clipped and shared, and remains one of the most-referenced single moments in the show’s history.
• KBC’s 1,000th episode (2021): a production milestone marking two decades of the format on Indian television.
• The 2022 personality-rights case: not a moment from inside the show, but a consequence of its cultural reach — Amitabh Bachchan’s Delhi High Court injunction over “Computer ji, lock kiya jaye” is one of the more significant Indian legal precedents connecting a TV host’s catchphrase to enforceable personality rights.

KBC’s ladder is built so that early questions are broad general knowledge and the final few require genuine specialist recall, cultural memory or careful reasoning under pressure. Harshvardhan Navathe’s 2000 crorepati question, for instance, turned on a specific constitutional detail — who the Indian Constitution permits to participate in Parliamentary proceedings without being a member (the Attorney General) — the kind of civics-textbook knowledge that rewards preparation over guesswork. Season 18’s “Sochna Padega” framing pushes this further: producers have said questions are being designed so that simply looking up an answer on a phone, mid-broadcast, would not actually help a viewer playing along, since the harder rungs test applying knowledge rather than retrieving a fact.

1. Registration and audition: prospective contestants register — historically by SMS or phone, now primarily through SonyLIV and, from Season 18, with Google Gemini assisting with eligibility guidance and preparation. Shortlisted candidates sit a written general-knowledge test before a further audition round.
2. Qualifying for the hot seat: studio contestants have historically competed in a Fastest Finger First round — correctly ordering a set of items faster than everyone else on stage — though the exact qualifying format has changed repeatedly (see the Season table above); several seasons used a “Triple Test” or leaderboard format instead.
3. The question ladder: the winning qualifier takes the hot seat and answers multiple-choice general-knowledge questions of increasing difficulty and value, climbing toward the season’s top prize.
4. Lifelines: at any point before answering, a contestant may use one of that season’s available lifelines (see the Lifelines table above) to remove wrong options, get outside help, or gain a hint.
5. Safety thresholds (“Padao”): the ladder includes guaranteed minimum amounts at fixed points; a contestant who reaches one keeps that amount even if a later question is answered wrong.
6. Walking away: a contestant can choose to stop and bank their current winnings before attempting the next question, rather than risk losing value below the last safety threshold.
7. The final question and jackpot: reaching and correctly answering the last question on the ladder wins that season’s full top prize — something only two contestants (Achin and Sarthak Narula, 2014) have done at KBC’s highest-ever ceiling.

Behind the format, KBC’s actual production and selection process — how candidates are shortlisted from applicants, how questions are vetted, how the studio show is scheduled — is not fully public. What’s described above reflects what Sony/SonyLIV and contestant interviews have confirmed; anything beyond that would be speculation, which this page avoids.

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was created by David Briggs, Steven Knight and Mike Whitehill for the British production company Celador, and premiered on ITV on 4 September 1998. Its core mechanic — a rising ladder of multiple-choice questions, a small set of lifelines, and a single life-changing top prize — proved exportable, and the format was licensed into dozens of national versions. India’s rights were acquired by Star India’s Sameer Nair in July 1999, through Steve Askew, Star’s Asian programming head, from ECM, the format’s Asian-rights holder. Quizmaster Siddhartha Basu’s production company, Synergy Communications, built the Indian version, and Star TV chairman Rupert Murdoch personally ordered the planned top prize raised from ₹1 lakh to ₹1 crore — the decision that gave the Indian version its name and, arguably, its entire cultural weight. KBC is therefore best understood not as a translation of the British show but as a distinct, heavily localised production built on a licensed mechanic — the prize scale, the host-led storytelling, the Hindi-language delivery and the lifeline names are all India-specific choices layered onto the imported format.

KBC’s 2000 launch landed at a specific moment in Indian television: cable and satellite penetration was expanding fast, Star Plus was a young, still-establishing pay channel, and Doordarshan-era “event television” — the kind that had once emptied streets during Ramayan and Mahabharat broadcasts — had largely faded. An academic study of the launch (published in Flow Journal, 2005) recorded a Season 1 TRP of 14, against single digits for competing programming, and credited the show with reviving that kind of mass, appointment-based viewing at a scale India hadn’t seen in over a decade.

Several things reinforced that initial pull. Amitabh Bachchan brought a level of film-star credibility no Indian quiz show had used before, at a point in his career when a hit television role was itself unexpected. The prize money was scaled to feel genuinely life-changing rather than incremental — a fact reflected in contestants like Sushil Kumar (a ₹6,000-a-month government worker before his 2011 win) and Kavita Chawla (a homemaker who auditioned for 22 years). The format rewarded general knowledge over specialised expertise, so a schoolteacher, a homemaker or a student could plausibly compete on the same footing as anyone else — and KBC’s producers have consistently cast contestants from small towns and modest professions alongside urban, well-off ones, which broadened who could see themselves in the hot seat. None of this happened in isolation from television economics: KBC’s ratings pull is also credited with helping establish Star Plus commercially in its early, pay-per-view years, which in turn justified the show’s own budget and prize scale.

What’s kept the show alive across three very different media eras — broadcast-only 2000s, SMS-and-cable 2010s, streaming-and-mobile 2020s — is less any single innovation than a willingness to keep changing the game’s mechanics (lifelines, prize ladder, qualifying round) while protecting the two things viewers actually returned for: Bachchan’s presence, and a contestant’s personal story unfolding in real time.

KBC’s audience relationship has moved through three distinct phases. In the SMS era, beginning around Season 5 (2011) with a feature called “Ghar Baithe Jeeto Jackpot,” home viewers texted in answers for a chance at a smaller cash prize, with no real-time interaction beyond that. The app era began in 2018 with the launch of KBC Play Along on SonyLIV (see below), which let viewers answer in sync with the live broadcast and compete for an actual hot-seat appearance. The AI era begins with Season 18 (2026): Sony’s partnership with Google Gemini folds an AI assistant into registration, contestant preparation and on-air engagement — reported by trade press as one of the first native generative-AI integrations built directly into a mainstream Indian entertainment format, rather than bolted on as a sponsor logo.

KBC Play Along launched on the SonyLIV app in 2018. It lets viewers answer the same questions the hot-seat contestant is facing, in real time, as the episode airs — scoring points for correct, fast answers. High-scoring players get a route to appear as a genuine hot-seat contestant on “Friday Special” episodes. From Season 16 (2024) onward, that route shifted to a monthly “India Challenger Week” rather than a weekly slot, qualified through a “Jaldi 5” buzzer round. Play Along represents KBC’s clearest bet that a broadcast-era format can keep growing by converting a purely passive audience into active, scored participants — without ever putting them in the physical studio.

Set and visuals

KBC’s studio look has grown more elaborate across eras — from a comparatively simple early-2000s set to a larger, more heavily produced stage in its Sony years — though a detailed, season-by-season design history is not well documented in public sources, and this page does not claim specific technology (LED walls, holograms) without a direct source. One confirmed change: Season 8 (2014) was reportedly shot outside Mumbai for the first time, at a venue in Surat.

Theme music

The internationally licensed Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? theme, used across the franchise’s national versions including KBC’s early years, was composed by Keith Strachan and Matthew Strachan. In August 2019, Bollywood composer duo Ajay–Atul (known for scores including Singham and Dhadak) produced a reworked version of KBC’s theme tune.

Signature phrases

“Computer ji, lock kiya jaye?” — Bachchan’s question to the on-set system before locking a contestant’s answer — has run continuously since Season 1 and remains in use today. It is documented not just in entertainment press but in a 2022 Delhi High Court case (see Records) that formally recognised the exact phrase and delivery as part of Bachchan’s protectable personality rights.

KBC survived because it combined several things television rarely holds together for this long: knowledge, risk, money, celebrity, and a family’s willingness to sit through an entire episode to find out what happens next. Its history is not simply a list of seasons and winners — it’s also a record of how Indian television itself changed, from the appointment-viewing broadcast era of 2000, through the SMS and cable years, to today’s television-plus-streaming-plus-AI audience that Season 18 is built for. As of this page’s last verification, KBC remains an active, currently airing show: Season 18 premiered on Sony Entertainment Television and SonyLIV on 10 August 2026, hosted by Amitabh Bachchan, with no confirmed successor host and no announced end date. This page will be updated, not replaced, as that season and any future ones are verified.