Access, Excellence and Scale in India’s National Programme for Technology-Enabled Learning (NPTEL): Identifying the Hidden Gaps

India’s National Programme for Technology-Enabled Learning (NPTEL), which originally began as a repository for Open Education Resources (OER), transitioned to a greater focus on Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) in 2014. As of June 2023, NPTEL boasts of more than 23 million enrolled learners, 2.86 million examination registrations, 5372 completed MOOCs and more than 5800 local chapters. The NPTEL website makes available finely grained semester-wise data to make the case that the numbers prove that it is a viable source of education delivery in the context of Indian Higher Education. This paper re-examines and reads this data against the grain (through a sequential denotative, connotative and deconstructive analysis), identifying significant gaps as well as probing whether the numbers alone tell the whole study of access to higher education through digital platform. In particular, the paper situates the dimensions of learner transition from enrolment to certification, classifications of learners and patterns of persistence, digital to physical connect through local chapters and learner diversity highlighted on the website against secondary data on geographical and cultural socio-economic parameters that restrict access to higher education. This reveals geographical skews in the distribution of learners in primarily 11 states of India. Similarly, a continuing predominance of male learners is evident. In doing so, a case is made for a more nuanced examination of systemic biases/barriers that might prevent an equitable access to the platform.