It is a matter of pride that Udaipur was chosen as one of 28 Nodal Centers for organizing Word’s largest Hackathon. Udaipur based Techno India NJR Institute of Technology was chosen as a Nodal Center again this year after their successful performance in Smart India Hackathon 2017.  

What is a Hackathon:

A Hackathon is an event, usually hosted by a tech company or organization, where programmers get together for a short period of time to collaborate on a project. The participants work rapidly and often work without sleep to achieve their task, as the events generally only last 24 hours to 36 hours or take place over a weekend.

Why Smart India Hackathon 2018

Our Hon’ble Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, envisages a Digital India to bridge the digital divide in our country and further promote digital literacy in order to make development a comprehensive mass movement and put governance within everyone’s reach in India. In order to work towards our PM’s vision, MHRD, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), Inter Institutional Inclusive Innovation Center (i4C), and Persistent Systems organized Smart India Hackathon 2017, a unique initiative to identify new and disruptive digital technology innovations for solving the challenges faced by our country. The initiative was a huge success. To reiterate the efforts towards our PM’s vision, MHRD, AICTE, i4C, and Persistent Systems is proud to propose the 2nd edition of this initiative – Smart India Hackathon 2018.

Smart India Hackathon 2018 is a non-stop digital product development competition, where problems are posed to technology students for innovative solutions

What makes it Largest in the World

27 Union Ministry & Departments, 17 State Ministries are participating in this event who gave 1060 Problem statements. More than one lakh students submitted their digital solutions out of which 1296 teams consisting of 10300 students were shortlisted for Grand finale to be held at 28 Nodal centers across India Simultaneously. Techno NJR was the Nodal center for Ministry of Railways.

Techno NJR saw arrival of 40 teams consisting of 300+ students and mentors arriving to their campus on 29th March. Teams came from Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Goa and also from smaller places like Medak, Jalgaon, Kunoor etc.  A team of 60 dedicated volunteers led by Umangini of 3rd year worked day and night for 4 days to ensure guests comfortable stay and food arrangement.  Coordinator for Udaipur Nodal Center Aaditya Maheshwari along with his team of 15 faculty members ensured that all required infrastructures like Labs , telecommunication network worked without any problem.

Event was judged by a panel of 16 judges including 7 judges from Railways led by Director Rajiv Gupta. Other judges included Mr. Lalit Yagnik, ex director IBM worldwide, Mr. Narendra Sharma, ex CEO, Hexaware, Mr. Damodar Dani, ex MD Modi Tyres, Dr. Raghuveer of GITS and others.

Hon’ble Prime mister was so enthused about this event that he decided to talk to students at all 28 Nodal Centers at 8 PM on 30th March when students were working hard to find solutions. PM’s talk when he addressed students as Problem Solvers of the country filled students with confidence.

Techno NJR organized a Zumba Session for participants at 10 pm through Lenny & Group. Early morning at 6 AM on 31st April, a session on Yoga was organized.

There were three prizes of Rs. 1 lakh, Rs. 75,000/- and Rs. 50,000/- for Winner, First Runner up and Second runner up.

Winning Teams

Team Electric Sheep of Bengaluru won first prize of Rs. 1 lakh for their solution of Public address system on platforms to be done on FM radio frequency so that passengers can hear announcement on their mobile phones, Radios and personal MP3 players. This will ensure that every passenger hears the announcement and do not miss their trains.

Team Janmitra of IIT, Dhanbad won second prize of rs. 50,000/- for their Machine learning algorithm-based solution to recognize type of complaint and send it directly to concerned official. This work has been difficult to be done manually as volume of complaint received via letter, e mail, Facebook, twitter and other social media is very high.

Third prize of Rs. 25,000/- was won by Team RangersZ from VJTI, Mumbai for their solution to predict Railway Telecom Network  failures and thereby minimize downtime. This is very important as entire reservation system and freight operations depend on efficient telecom network.