Chaitanya Srivastava
After two decades navigating the evolving landscape of his industry, Chaitanya Jee Srivastava felt a growing unease – a realization that his original degree no longer fully equipped him for the challenges ahead. This feeling sparked a transformative journey: through relentless learning across 19 rigorous NPTEL courses and two specialized certifications, he forged a path from engineering and management to clean energy startup, blending knowledge and experience into innovation.
He didn’t set out to become a serial online learner. Around 2016, a friend from his college days mentioned the platform in passing. He went looking, half expecting another stereotypical online course, and found something else: rigour.
“As rigorous as one would encounter in a good engineering college,” he says, and that was enough to pull him in.
During the pandemic, as work slowed down and time opened up, he seized the opportunity to pursue domain certifications in AI and Data Science. Enrolling in a total of 12 courses across both fields, he continued to expand his learning.. Courses taught by professors like Balaraman Ravindran, Sudeshna Sarkar, and Mausam stood out not just for content but for how seriously they treated the learner. A course on integrated waste management for smart cities, somewhat outside his usual lane, ended up giving him a full picture of India’s waste value chain, from kitchen scraps to policy gaps.
As a working professional rather than a student, these courses offered neither academic credits nor obvious additions to his CV. There were moments he wondered whether those hours would be better spent on revenue-generating work. But the reasoning was simple: not being a CS graduate meant that truly understanding the technologies reshaping his field required building a solid foundation rather than taking shortcuts. He is now the founder of a startup focused on project services for renewable energy: feasibility analysis, system engineering, detailed project reports, and contract management, all built around solar PV, battery storage, and green hydrogen projects. The company’s tools, he says, are increasingly powered by AI agents, and the plan going forward is to grow it into a leading name in clean tech.
“NPTEL gave me a grounding based on which I could understand how these technologies work and how they’re going to affect traditional businesses,” he says.
That grounding, more than any single course or exam score, is what he carries into the company he’s building. His advice to students is practical: explore electives your college doesn’t offer, build the academic credit bank, and don’t wait for permission. For the professionals who want to pursue a similar path, it’s even simpler: no more sifting through random videos online, wondering if they’re worth your time, with NPTEL you already know the answer is yes. “You don’t have to waste too much time figuring out what’s worth your time,” he says. “You can be sure of the courses being offered by professors of IITs and NITs.” He closes with something less about credentials and more about purpose: a wish for a “Powerful and technologically advanced India,” built, in his own case, one course and one startup at a time.
~written by Elsa Prasad