Smart India Hackathon kicks off in Coimbatore with 10k developers

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 today.

In the 36-hours non-stop digital programming competition, developers will try 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."

Teams started coding at 8.30 am today and will stop coding at 6.00 pm on 2nd April. Final Judging will begin at 6.00 pm on 2nd April and results will be announced at 8.00 pm on 2nd April.

The winners for the hackathon will be awarded by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), with a cash prize of Rs 1 lakh for the winner and Rs 75,000 and 50,000 for the consecutive runners-up.

Also, honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address innovators present at the event via live video conferencing.