Pragyan Bharadwaj – NPTEL STAR
On a quiet morning in a lab at IIT Guwahati, a young researcher works on a solar dryer project, thinking about how today’s data might turn into tomorrow’s research. That researcher is Pragyan Bharadwaj, and tracing the path from this lab bench back through the years, the same signboard appears over and over again – NPTEL.
Years earlier, Pragyan was pursuing Mechanical Engineering at Guwahati, moving through the first-year mix of Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry. At that point, engineering was more like a schedule than a calling, until he discovered that the kind of advanced courses he associated with IITs and IISc classrooms were actually open to anyone willing to learn. He chose to begin simply, telling himself, “First, let me learn and get familiar with the structure,” and that was his first turn.
His first choice was rooted in his love for making things, a course titled “Weldability of Metals” from IIT Roorkee. Soon after enrolling, he spotted another offering “Waste to Energy Conversion” and signed up for that as well. Somewhere between those two classrooms on a screen, learning shifted – from racing to complete modules to staying with concepts until they held. When COVID hit and postponed a full year of NPTEL exams to December, those early choices faced their first real test, 12 exams over six straight days, and he powered through, passing 11. Once Pragyan understood the rhythm, he started planning his weeks around it, and it began to set the pace of an unusually long semester.
NPTEL became his second campus through his B.Tech and later his M.Tech in Energy Technology, and over the years he successfully completed 61 courses.
When the core subject ‘Theory of Machines’ arrived in college – well known for its reputation of causing backlogs – his parallel learning proved invaluable! Having already explored the concepts through the NPTEL course from IIT Madras, he approached the subject with confidence, and to his own delight, it became his highest-scoring paper that semester and later a dependable strength in competitive exams.
Finally the certificates followed, turning learning into tangible reminders that his efforts were adding up to something real. Along the way, NPTEL itself put a name to his consistency – recognitions like Believer, Motivated Learner, Enthusiast, Superstar, and Megastar – alongside domain certifications in ‘Production Technology’, ‘Manufacturing, and Energy Systems’. Each one felt like another milestone. The titles were not as important as what they stood for – steady work, repeated over semesters.
Then the signboard pointed to a new road: he applied for the NPTEL pre-doctoral fellowship, ranked his preferred projects, and soon found himself on a call with Professor Pankaj Kalita at IIT Guwahati, an interview that led him into a solar-dryer project. The opportunity connected his M.Tech work on hybrid supercapacitors to a new agenda in solar energy, and soon he was in the lab learning how to design experiments, analyse data and turn results into research papers.
When you ask Pragyan what NPTEL truly changed, and he doesn’t begin with a certificate or a title – he starts with the type of learner he became: steadier, more consistent, and more willing to go beyond what was written in the course booklet.
In his story, NPTEL is a long semester that never really ends – the one that taught him how to keep learning, no matter what came next.
So even now, back in that IIT Guwahati lab, the signboard still stands in his mind, pointing him toward the next question rather than a final destination.
– written by Nehansh Kesharwani