PM to interact with Smart India Hackathon finale participants on August 25: MoE

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will interact with students participating in the grand finale of this year’s Smart India Hackathon (SIH) on August 25, Union Minister of State for Education Subhas Sarkar announced on Tuesday.

The hackathon is a nationwide initiative to provide students with a platform to solve some of the pressing problems people face in daily lives, and thus inculcate a culture of product innovation and a mindset of problem-solving.

“Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been interacting with the student participants of the Smart India Hackathon every year since its inception and he is expected to interact with the students even this year at 8 pm on August 25,” Sarkar said at a press conference.

The prime minister will interact with the students through video-conferencing.

Development of a crime predicting model or tool for hotspot mapping using image processing and artificial intelligence and machine learning approach; transfer of multimedia data through police radio sets; optical character recognition of temple inscriptions and translations in Devanagari scripts; high resolution 3D model of terrain, infrastructure and roads conditions in disaster stuck areas and IoT enabled risk monitoring system in cold supply chain for perishable food items are among the problem statements on which students are working during this year’s hackathon.

The Ministry of Education is organising Smart India Hackathon software and hardware edition for more than 15,000 students. This year Smart India Hackathon – Junior has also been introduced for school students to build a culture of innovation and problem-solving attitude at the school level.

“The scope of the Smart India hackathon has been widening with every passing year, since its launch in 2017. The increased enthusiasm among participating students and problem statement providing organisations could be seen in their growing participation over the years. Every year, SIH is impacting lakhs of students and provides them with a national platform to test their educational learning for solving real-world challenges,” Sarkar said.

“It also aligns their interest toward innovation and entrepreneurship. A total of 476 problem statements were received from 53 government organisations for the SIH this year. The winner teams of institute level hackathons organised under Smart India Hackathon 2022, comprising of more than 15,000 students will participate in this year’s SIH grand finale at national level. These teams will travel to the assigned nodal center and will work on these problem statements during grand finale,” he added.

Smart India Hackathon hardware grand finale is scheduled from August 25 to 29 and the software grand finale is scheduled from August 25 to 26.

Each year Smart India Hackathon is conducted at various nodal centers, where selected student teams, industry representatives, design mentors and evaluators travel to the assigned physical centers.

As part of ‘Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav’ celebrations, the Ministry of Education’s Innovation Cell and All India Council for Technical Education has identified 75 higher educational institutes and incubators as Smart India Hackathon nodal centers to host the participant of SIH and facilitate an environment to conduct the Smart India hackathon in its well defined and established format.

“At each nodal center, an officer designated by the Ministry of Education’s Innovation Cell will monitor and preside over the proceeding during the entire duration of SIH grand finale. The participation of females in the Smart India hackathon is also very impressive. The male to female ratio of participants that are travelling to the nodal centers for the hackathon grand finale is almost 1.5:1,” Sarkar said.

The winners in the Smart India Hackathon on each problem statement will be awarded a prize amount of ₹1 lakh. Under the student innovation category three prizes of ₹1 lakh, ₹75,000 and ₹50,000 will be awarded to the winning teams.