Chennai: It was first conceived in 1999 for the cause of spreading technical education in the underdeveloped regions of the country. In 2003, web and video content was introduced to support the engineering students nationwide. Today, the National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) has got approval from the HRD Ministry to offer degree and diploma equivalents to students enrolled in the virtual university, report Revathi Ramanan & Ishan Srivastava of The Times of India. The NPTEL is a very popular web based education program across 17 countries with over four million hits registered. In its new avatar as a virtual university, it will, from next year, increase the number of disciplines offered from five to 20 and the virtual courses will go up to 1,000 from 260. Usha Nagarajan, Principal Project Officer, NPTEL said, "Currently we offer 135 video courses and 125 web courses. By the time we launch the Open Virtual University in 2012, we will have around 1,000 courses in both undergraduate and postgraduate." The NPTEL program comprises of video recordings of lectures by faculties of IIT that is distributed across the length and breadth of the country. The biggest benefactors of the program are the private engineering institutes who lack experienced faculty. NPTEL is the brainchild of seven IITs and the Indian Institute of Science. The IITs are now involved in identifying 15 college groups in the country where the Virtual University's laboratories could be set up to enhance the cause of the program.