The ministry of human resource development, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has launched this hackathon initiative with i4c, MyGov, Persistent Systems , NASSCOM and Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodini. (Reuters)

The Smart India Hackathon 2017 is set to be the world’s biggest digital product development hackathon ever held. A total of 10,000 youngsters will be racking their brains to find solutions to the problems and challenges faced by India on its digital journey. Twenty nine government departments from railways to aviation, defence to earth sciences, rural development to external affairs will be participating in the event. They have put forward a total of 598 problem statements that have to be solved at the hackathon. The youngsters will be coding for 36 hours non-stop across 26 cities all over the country to find solutions to the problems that the government departments have put forth.

There will be 1,268 teams having six to eight members each from almost all the states will participate in the Smart India Hackathon starting on April 1, 2017.

The ministry of human resource development, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has launched this hackathon initiative with i4c, MyGov, Persistent Systems, NASSCOM and Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodini.

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This will be the first time that the government ministries and departments will be directly engaging with students to build digital solutions to improve their efficiency, plug revenue leakages and corruption.

Conducting a hackathon of this scale and involving students to get them excited to something meaningful and challenging was the idea of Abhay Jere, VP and head of Persistent Labs at Persistent Systems Limited.

According to Anand Deshpande, CMD of Persistent Systems, this would be one of the world’s biggest hackathons. “The inspiration for this event came after a hackathon was conducted in Pune for the city’s smart city campaign and many have gone on to build companies based on those ideas,” Deshpande said.

At the end of the hackathon, each of the 29 participating ministries will be picking up three winners each and awarding cash prizes of 3.5 lakh to the winners at the Grand Finale.

These wining solutions could also find their way into government as they look to deploy these solutions. Winners could get the chance of converting their winning ideas into start-ups. The total prize money set aside for winning teams is Rs 50 lakh.