New Delhi Smart India Hackathon (SIH), the world’s biggest open platform for innovators and entrepreneurs of tomorrow, gets off to a grand – and fully digital – start on Saturday with Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing the grand finale of Smart India Hackathon 2020 via video conferencing.
The Prime Minister will interact with the students on the inaugural day of the hackathon, after the first round of evaluation concludes tomorrow. The national level inauguration of the programme from the National Capital at 0900 hrs will be attended by Union Human Resource Development Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ and Minister of State HRD Sanjay Dhotre.
Being conducted every year since 2017, SIH is a nationwide initiative to provide students a platform to solve some of the pressing problems we face in our daily lives, and thus inculcate a culture of product innovation and a mindset of problem solving. There are two formats for the Hackathon – SIH Software and SIH Hardware Editions.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the SIH Software Edition is being conducted in fully ONLINE mode. Student participants, coordinators and industry evaluators are coming together on a digital platform designed to facilitate the implementation of the event which is being managed centrally by Human Resource Ddevelopment Ministry’s Innovation Cell and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).
Prin L N Welingkar Institute of Management Development and Research, which is the nodal centre for the hackathon in Mumbai, will facilitate the five-day operations of the SIH software edition and provide support to participants. The local inauguration will take place at the Mumbai nodal centre on August 1 morning. A total of 35 teams comprising 210 participants are competing on seven problem statements from three organisations – CDK Global, MathWorks and MixORG. Each problem statement has a prize amount of Rs one lakh.
This year SIH team and experts from participating ministries/companies/organisations will centrally monitor the performance of each student innovator during hackathon and will decide on funding their Innovation and on offering them an opportunity of internship or job at their organisation.
HRD Secretary Amit Khare, AICTE Chairman Prof Anil Sahasrabudhe, MHRD’s Innovation Cell Chief Innovation Officer Dr Abhay Jere, Bureau of Police Research and Development DG V K Kaumadi, Persistent Systems CMD Anand Deshpande and Amazon Internet Services Pvt Ltd, India and South Asia Public Sector President Rahul Sharma will also take part in the inaugural session.
During the previous three editions of the Smart India Hackathon, the event had been conducted at the various nodal centres, where student participants, industry representatives and mentors used to congregate physically at the assigned nodal centers to provide a solution on the selected problems.
