MHRD’s Smart India Hackathon 2019 Hardware Edition Begins at IIT Kharagpur

NEW DELHI, JULY 8: The world’s largest innovation competition, ‘Smart India Hackathon 2019’ which is currently in its third successful year of implementation started at IIT Kharagpur today. The week-long Hardware Edition of the competition is witnessing teams participating from across the states.

“With India’s fastest-moving economy, we need to solve the problems that exist in society. For this, we thought of an open innovation competition, and students came up with the idea of Smart India Hackathon. This is not only the world’s largest innovation competition, but it is also currently in its third successful year of implementation. Student participation is increasing with each passing year, indicating that the students are no longer limited to class. I am sure this competition will not only give winners but also society solutions for many problems like an agrarian crisis, water scarcity and many more,” said Dr. Ramesh Pokhriyal 'Nishank', Minister of Human Resource Development, who inaugurated the event through video conferencing across 18 nodal centres in 9 states and one UT.

Explaining the concept of Hackathon, Prof. P P Chakrabarti of IIT Kharagpur who has been mentoring this event addressed it as a new education methodology. “The paradigm of engineering education is transforming in such a way that there are newer methods of learning and gradually becoming part of the core curriculum. Hackathon enables multiple aspects – first is the doing aspect of core engineering, second is bringing focus on economics, humanities and social sciences along with technical aspect and creative idea generation, this forming a convergence,” he pointed out.

At IIT Kharagpur 93 students will work towards solving challenges for Smart Vehicle, Smart Communication, Security and Surveillance and Miscellaneous. The students are expected to bring out technology-based, easy, workable solutions through 'out-of-the-box-thinking', which will lead to commercial products to develop start-ups.

“There are many areas where the country is looking for viable solutions and I am really happy to see a large number of young talents coming forward to take up those challenges, to think differently as to how solutions to these problems can be given; and that’s what is very important,” said Prof. S K Bhattacharyya, Director (Officiating) of IIT Kharagpur.

SIH 2019 has given particular attention towards promoting the participation of female candidates and the national figure seems as enthusiastic this year with a ratio of male and female being 1.6:1.