The grand finale of the Smart India Hackathon 2018 (Software Edition) will be held on 30th and 31st March, 2018 at 28 nodal centres across the country. This was announced at a media briefing in New Delhi today by Minister for Human Resource Development, Prakash Javadekar. Smart India Hackathon is the World’s largest Nation-Building Digital Initiative of the HRD Ministry and conceptualized to harness the creativity and energy of bright young students for the development of our nation, the Minister said.Prakash Javadekar disclosed that after the roaring success of Smart India Hackathon- 2017, we have started working on the Smart India Hackathon-2018 edition.The Minister was hopeful that the solutions given by the students will be helpful in overcoming the challenges faced by various ministries and departments. This year’s initiative has Software as well as Hardware edition and includes participation from States. He informed that for SIH 2018, we have received participation from 27 Central Ministries/Departments and 17 State Governments who have sent more than 900 problem statements. After scrutinizing these problem statements, 408 problems (340 for Software and 68 for Hardware) were finally selected for the Hackathon and have been put out on MyGov platform.The Minister added that for SIH - 2018, we have received 17400+ teams with participation of around one lakh students of Engineering, Management and MCA. These entries were scrutinized and now 1296 entries are selected for the Grand Finale.
He further said that SIH-2018 comprises of two competitions – Software Hackathon and Hardware Hackathon. The final round of Software Hackathon competition will be conducted for continuous 36 hours at 28 nodal centers across the country on 30th and 31st March 2018 while Hardware Hackathon competition will be conducted in the month of June 2018.Around 8000 students will attempt to give solutions for the listed 340 software problems. There are prizes to be won for different categories at each centre similar to the last year. Moreover, MHRD is also engaging with DST to ensure that selected teams from SIH2018 could be supported by Technology Business Incubators (TBIs) as Start-ups and DST has responded very positively towards these efforts.Giving details of SIH 2017, Shri Prakash Javadekar said that for the first edition of Smart India Hackathon (2017) initiative, the received 598 problem statements from 29 Central ministries. These problem statements were displayed on MyGov website and students across all technical institutions were sensitized to participate by having 25+ workshops across India.As a result, more than 7500 teams (Total 40,000+ students; 6 students + 2 Mentors per team) applied.
These entries were scrutinized with help of more than 200 evaluators primarily from industry sector and finally 1168 teams were shortlisted for the Grand Finale on 1st and 2nd April 2017.On evening of 1st April, 2017, the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi addressed students over a video conference and inspired them to work for the country. He also appreciated the concepts of SIH2017 initiative.The Grand Finale for SIH2017 was conducted across 26 different cities simultaneously during which more than 9000 students worked non-stop for 36 hrs. Post Hackathon, all winning 135 teams of the Grand Finale were asked to engage with respective ministries to take the projects forward.Different Ministries agreed to support 56 teams. It was also decided that teams selected by ministries for taking projects forward will be given Rs. 3.0 lakh as grant which will cover Rs.5000 as stipend for 6 months for all the 6 members and for covering project related expenses.
AICTE also requested Persistent Systems Ltd to mentor the students to ensure that developed products are state-of-the-art quality.AICTE decided to pay the Grant to all the teams from its own budget, provided the concerned Ministry is ready to guide the projects and assure that these projects will be implemented.On 15th March, 2018 the MoS for MHRD, Shri Satyapal Singh personally spoke to 15 teams over video conferencing to review the status and deployment schedule of these projects and the progress was found satisfactory.Some of the interesting projects of Smart India Hackathon developed by the students include a special pendrive to prevent data theft (for ISRO), Airport crowd management system (for Air India), a platform for North-East artefacts, a gaming solution for health benefits (for Ministry of AYUSH) among others. At least 27 projects will get implemented and adopted by different departments by the end of April or mid May 2018.