Smart India Hackathon Under process: kicks off in Coimbatore

With more than 10,000 developers from various cities of the country, India is hosting the largest hackathon of the world. ‘Smart India Hackathon’, a competition to build an innovative digital business model solving a social problem existing in India, was kicked off at Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology in Coimbatore recently.

In the 36-hours non-stop digital programming competition, developers tried to find solutions to the problems identified by 29 ministries and departments of the government. They identified 598 problems to which 7,531 teams of approximately 42,000 students responded to. Of them, 1,266 teams of 10,000 participants were shortlisted for the finale.

Projects like farmer-retailer interface to prevent intermediaries in the food processing ministry, ticket checking system in civil aviation ministry, improvement of road and transport facility in surface transport ministry, checking of steel, soil and water quality in respective departments and man-animal conflict are some of the topics that are given to the developers. The solutions should be functional either by a mobile app or a through desktop. The aim is to create a “permanent platform to harvest the creativity and energy of the youth directly for nation building.”