Ram Raj G – NPTEL STAR
On a rain‑soaked weekend in Tamil Nadu, a commerce professor sat in a distant NPTEL exam center with an umbrella by his chair, a lunch box from home at his feet, and a mock test on his laptop. From morning till evening, he moved between the corridor and labs, revising and writing back‑to‑back exams while other candidates came and went. Between those long hours and the glow of the screen, Dr. Ram Raj G decided that if his students could push past their limits, so could he. Those two days with NPTEL would become the difference between a modest salary and a very different professional life.
Long before that turning point, Dr. Ram was a lecturer from rural Virudhunagar, Tamil Nadu, where IITs and IIMs were headlines rather than actual addresses. In 2019, while teaching at VHNSN College, a senior professor encouraged students to take an NPTEL course in Financial Accounting. When his students asked for help navigating the platform, he realised there was only one honest answer: join them. He enrolled, studied alongside the class, wrote the exam, and scored well. That result left him wondering what this platform could do for a teacher still hungry to grow. For him, NPTEL opened three doors at once – access to faculty he could not otherwise reach, a way to keep his subject knowledge alive, and recognition that counted in appraisals.
That first course sparked a healthy competition. If his students wrote one exam in a semester, he would write two – a teacher, he felt, could not demand effort he would not make himself. Then, at an IIT Madras ceremony, he heard a fellow learner mention finishing eight courses in a single term, and something in him quietly asked: why could he not try more?
He registered for twelve exams the following term, passed them all, and went home as NPTEL Champion.
That title was the result of an unglamorous routine. His classes ended around 4:30 p.m., but he left his cabin only after two concentrated hours of NPTEL study. “Whatever I learned from NPTEL today, the next day I will implement in my class,” he says. Later, when he discovered the NPTEL mentoring opportunity, those private evenings expanded into a shared discipline. After four o’clock, he was no longer a professor and his students were no longer students; they were simply learners together, working through the same course, at the same pace.
He mentored 55 students for the ‘Introduction to GST’ course; three of them, along with Dr. Ram himself, finished in the top one percent, earning him ‘Top Performing Mentor’ recognition. Many more recognitions followed – 37 completed courses, two Domain Scholar certifications in ‘Faculty Advanced’ and ‘Managerial Economics’, and a trail of badges: Believer, Motivated Learner, Champion, Evangelist, and four Discipline Star certificates.
The interview that made the impact undeniable came at Christ University, Bengaluru. The panel asked what he had beyond formal study; he placed roughly thirty NPTEL certificates before them. The reaction was one of surprise: how could a full-time faculty accomplish so many courses if most students had trouble with only one?!
He got the job, and his income moved into six figures, a leap that changed his life.
Perhaps that is why his favourite description of NPTEL is a hammer. “NPTEL is a good hammer that always hits my head,” he says, a reminder that a doctorate is not a finishing line. For a man with eight degrees, that is not a small admission. No credential, he believes, marks the end of learning. The hammer never stopped, and neither did he.
– written by Nehansh Kesharwani