It has become fashionable these days to abuse IITs and their faculties. I get it, freedom of speech, healthy skepticism of institutions, all fair game. But before that fashionable takedown becomes the whole story, sit with this 1 fact for a second.... Right now, last month, IIT profs have put more free, peer-reviewed, university grade course content into the world than any other institution on the planet, and most Indians have never watched a single hour of it. 2001.... A handful of IIT directors come back from a trip to Carnegie Mellon, having seen an American prof build an entire functioning university around teaching people online. They are stunned enough to try replicating it for India, in engineering, at a scale nobody had attempted before. The idea finally took shape under Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government. The man holding the HRD portfolio through that entire stretch, 1998-2004, was Murli Manohar Joshi, himself a physics prof before he was ever a minister. On January 26, 2003, months before NPTEL's own official rollout that year, Joshi Ji personally inaugurated a companion initiative, the Eklavya Technology Channel, explicitly built to beam actual IIT classrooms into homes across the country. 7 IITs and the IISc quietly went live. No press conference most people remember. Just profs, cameras, and a govt that wrote the check for something nobody could fully prove would work. The word "MOOC" did not even exist yet. Coursera and edX launched in 2012. The term was not even coined until 2008. NPTEL was already recording real lectures years before Silicon Valley invented free online university education and got magazine covers for it. India did not copy the MOOC revolution, it built one of the first drafts before anyone had a name for it. Fast forward to now. NPTEL is the largest repository of engineering and science course content on Earth: - 56,000+ hours of lectures -3,200+ courses - a YouTube channel with 1.86B views and 5.6M subscribers ...built entirely by government-funded faculty, not a venture-backed edtech company. Not entertainment.... Thermodynamics. Signal processing. Soil mechanics. Quantum Mechanics. Built by profs people love to mock as "out of touch," "irrelevant," "stuck in an old system." A student in rural Bihar with a smartphone has, right now, the same lecture an IIT KGP student sat through, free, no JEE rank required. And yet ask most students outside the IIT system if they have done a single NPTEL certification, and you will mostly get silence. Employers still do not weight it the way they weight a foreign MOOC certificate with a fraction of the rigor. The exact students this was built for often do not know it exists. If a country builds the largest free reservoir of elite education on the planet, a decade ahead of everyone else, and barely drinks from it, is that the institution's failure / ours, for criticizing loudly and never once checking what is already free and sitting right there? Criticize the IITs all you want, no institution should be above scrutiny. But this particular story deserves the same volume as the criticism. It just never gets it.