Smart India Hackathon begins

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 18

The grand finale of Smart India Hackathon-2018 – Hardware Edition (SIH2018), a first-of-its-kind competitive event providing an opportunity to young technical minds for showcasing their creativity, started at Central Scientific Instruments Organisation (CSIO) here on Monday.

Over the next five days, participating teams will work 24x7 at CSIO laboratories with support from CSIO scientists and technicians to design and fabricate innovative gadgets.

CSIO Director Prof RK Sinha said, “Smart India Hackathon is an initiative to encourage young students to inculcate out-of-box thinking and harness the power of digital techniques for developing affordable products and technologies, bridge the digital divide in our country and to promote digital literacy for sustainable development.”

Stating that the responsibility for sustainable development of technologies and products for the benefit of masses lies on the shoulders of the scientific community, he added affordable technologies must include grass-root innovation and out-of-box thinking by young minds to tap their immense intellectual acumen into useful ideas and technological leads.

The event will include three judging rounds and an additional ‘power judging’ round where top teams will be judged by industry experts and investors.

Prakash Javadekar, Union Minister for Human Resources Development, and other senior members of the ministry also addressed the participants through video-conferencing. The ministry is working closely with the Department of Science and Technology to explore the possibility of handholding the winning teams into becoming startups with the support from technology business incubators.