The much-awaited Smart India Hackathon 2017 Grand Finale finally gets off to a colourful start on April 1 and 2 simultaneously at 26 different nodal centres across India culminating in a ICMR grand finale to be held at Kolkata, West Bengal.
The event is being organised by ICMR, a ‘Premier Partner’ in this initiative.
Launched on Nov 9, 2016, Smart India Hackathon 2017 harnesses creativity & expertise of students, builds funnel for ‘Startup India, Standup India’ campaign, crowd sources solutions for improving governance and quality of life, and extends/ give opportunity to citizens to provide innovative solutions to India’s daunting problems.
Dr SoumyaSwaminathan, Secretary, DHR & DG, ICMR said this was a wonderful experiment to tap young minds to solve the country’s problems.
Smart India Hackathon 2017 is expected to become the ‘world’s biggest open innovation model’ that other countries can replicate.
Since Hackathon as a concept is new to India, AICTE arranged 26 awareness workshops across India to sensitise students.
These workshops helped connect students to the problems of our nation.
Out of the 7,531 idea submissions received for the 598 problems posted by 29 govt. departments, 1,266 ideas have been shortlisted for the ‘Grand Finale’ on April 1 & 2, 2017, during which these teams will work nonstop for 36 hours to build products based on their ideas, across 26 locations in India.
