Third edition of Smart Hackathon launched

Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar today announced the launch of the third edition of "Smart Hackathon", a national competition for students to develop digital solutions for real life problems.

In the earlier two editions, the HRD Ministry used to invite problem statements from ministries and state governments and the students were free to choose from them and work on solutions.

"We have been doing it for two years. This is third edition of Smart India Hackathon and in September we will seek problem statements from ministries and state governments. For the first time we will also seek suggestions from industry people if they have any unsolved problems which they are seeking solutions for," Javadekar told reporters here.

"From October the students will be able to register. In the first edition of Hackathon, 40000 students had participated in the first edition while last year over 1 lakh students took part. We are expecting participation of around 1.5 lakh students this year," he added.

In order to engage the youth in coming up with digital solutions to common problems, the All India Council for Technical Education under the aegis of HRD ministry, had launched the hackathon in April, 2p17.

Twenty-nine departments under various ministries presented 598 problem statements for which they don't have digital solutions and due to which there has been inefficiency, revenue loss and corruption.

"Smart India Hackathon is a non-stop digital product development competition, where problems are posed to technology students for innovative solutions.

"It harnesses creativity & expertise of students, sparks institute-level hackathons, builds funnel for 'Startup India' campaign, crowd sources solutions for improving governance and quality of life and provides opportunity to citizens to provide innovative solutions to India's daunting problems," a senior HRD official said.