Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, Aug 24: To progress, innovate and create large pool of good problem solvers, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and University Grant Commission (UGC) are undertaking multiple initiatives to promote creativity, critical thinking and development of cognitive skills.
One of the key initiatives of MHRD is Smart India Hackathon, which is specially aimed at promoting the culture creativity and problem solving amongst students.
Hackathons (Hack+ Marathon) are sprint-like events during which engineers/students, graphic designers, interface designers, experts collaborate together to develop a functional product capable of solving the given problem within stipulated time-frame eg; 36 hours or 48 hours.
The primary objective of a Hackathon is to test the viability of any good idea by building minimal functional product in a short time span.
This year, Smart India Hackathon (SIH)-2020 is in its 4th edition and earlier three editions were bumper success. For Smart India Hackathon-2017 and 2018, the organisers approached various ministries/agencies of Central and State government and requested them to share their Governance related problems.
“We received problem statements in large numbers from these agencies including prestigious institutions like ISRO, Dept. of Atomic energy, Earth Sciences, Railways, etc. These problems were used to challenge the technical students to offer innovative solutions across all major Indian technical institutions. For SIH2018, more than 1 lakh students from 1600+ institutions participated in the first round. After two rounds of screening, we selected approx. 10000 students with innovative ideas to work non-stop for 36 hrs across 28 different cities in India. Undoubtedly, SIH became world’s biggest Hackathon. Unknowingly, we also successfully established world’s biggest open innovation model,” stated MHRD.
“Today, we announce SIH 2020 and this year are keen on inviting problem statements from various industries, Semi-Govt/ Public-Sector Organizations, NGOs and even local bodies. We hope to have problem statements from more than 200 public and private organizations. We expect these problems to be far more challenging to our young technical minds. Together, we can achieve the sea-change in quality of technical students produced by Indian education system,” the statement added.
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