The Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi
will address the students participating in Smart India Hackathon 2017 tomorrow i.e. 1st
April at 10 p.m through video conferencing. The Smart India Hackathon is intended for
promoting innovation, out-of-the-box thinking in young minds, especially
engineering students. It is focused on the problems of social importance as
identified by 29 Ministries/Departments of Govt of India.
It is worth mentioning that the starting point of the Smart India hackathon
is the Digital India, Start up India and Make in India campaigns,
which need skilled and innovative workforce.
With more than 10,000 programmers participating, this would be largest Hackathon
anywhere in the world.
The Grand Finale of Smart India Hackathon will start at 8 a.m. on 1st
April and would end at 8 p.m. on 2nd April in 26 different locations in the Country with
each location handheld by one department/Ministry of Govt of India. For the preparations of the finale,
online trainings were given to students
by approximately 2110 mentors appointed to guide the
students. During
the Finale, the selected groups will sit locked in for 36 hours continuously
from 8 am on April 1, 2017 till 8 pm on April 2, 2017 and complete digital
solutions for the problem statements through programming to create computer
software or a mobile app. The software so created is evaluated by judges drawn
from the respective ministry and industry experts and the best solutions will
be awarded @ Rs. 1 lakh, Rs. 75,000 and Rs. 50,000 for the top three teams
respectively. The awarded software would be used by
the Ministry/Departments for improving their governance systems, if necessary,
with suitable upgradation. All
the prize winners would be connected to form a Community of Innovative Minds.
The Minister for Human Resource Development, Shri
Prakash Javadekar is the Chief Patron of the campaign. Ministry of Human Resource
Development spearheaded the campaign through AICTE as the main anchor. The IT
industry especially M/S i4C and Persistent Systems, and NASSCOM have led the
effort. Mr Abhay Jere of the Persistent Systems has coordinated efforts by
various Departments and Ministries of the Government of India.
Various departments and Ministries of the Government
of India have identified 598 problems to which 7,531 teams of approximately 42,000
students responded. In this 1266 teams of 10000 participants from 28 States
were shortlisted for the finale. Some
of the problems identified by the Ministry of
Railways are such as
the condition of Railway track is critical for safety of train operations. The
condition of tracks needs to be monitored proactively. A software solution
which keeps track of the condition of the track and allied infrastructure and
generates auto warning messages about the need of urgent maintenance can help
in preventing untoward incidents.
As per statistics of
World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), India registers 40 patents per
million population, so considering the intellectual capability of Indians,
there is a lot that can be done in the field of innovation. The Smart India
Hackathon is an effort in the direction to improve innovation. This can be done
by encouraging students to apply knowledge to the real-life situations, and to
find innovative solutions to the day-to-day problems.
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GG/AK/RK/Smart India Hackathon -2017