PM Modi to address grand finale of world's largest ever online hackathon this week

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the grand finale of the largest ever online hackathon in the world on August 1 through video-conference, , Union Minister for HRD Shri Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ announced on Monday.

The grand finale of Smart India Hackathon 2020 (Software) will be held from August 1-3 and the Prime Minister will address over 10,000 participants at 7 pm on the first day. 

In view of COVID-19 pandemic, the grand finale is being organised online by connecting participants pan-India over a specially-built advanced platform. More than 10,000 participants will compete for 36 hours to develop innovative digital solutions for some of the daunting problems of government departments and industry. 

This hackathon is being organised by the Ministry of Human Resources Development, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), Persistent Systems and i4c.

The HRD Minister on Monday chaired a high-level meeting on and discussed achievements of the already conducted hackathons. 

The minister said that Smart India Hackathon is a unique initiative to identify new and disruptive digital technology innovations for solving the challenges faced by our country. It is a non-stop digital product development competition, where problems are posed to technology students to suggest innovative solutions. Students would have the opportunity to work on challenges faced by Government departments and private sector organizations for which they can offer out-of-the-box and world-class solutions, he said. 

For SIH 2020, the first level screening of students’ ideas has already taken place in January through a college-level hackathon and only the winning teams at the college level were made eligible for the national round of SIH.

Again at the national level, ideas were screened by Experts and Evaluators and only the shortlisted teams will compete during the Grand Finale, the ministry said in a press release. 

This year, we will have more than 10,000 students competing to solve 243 problem statements from 37 central government departments, 17 state governments and 20 industries. Each Problem Statement carries prize money of Rs one lakh, except the student innovation theme which will have three winners, 1st, 2nd and 3rd with prize money of Rs one lakh, Rs 75,000 and Rs 50,000 respectively.

The first edition of the hackathon in 2017 saw the participation of 42,000 students which substantially increased to one lakh in 2018 and later to two lakh in 2019. SIH 2020 is even more massive as compared to SIH 2019 and the first round saw the participation of more than 4.5 lakh students.