'Smart Hackathon' third edition launched by HRD Minister Javadekar

New Delhi, Aug 29 : Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar today announced the launch of the third edition of 'Smart Hackathon', a national competition for students to develop digital solutions for real-life problems. In the first two editions, the HRD ministry invited problem statements from ministries and state governments and the students were free to chose from them and work on solutions.

"We have been doing it for two years. This is the third edition of Smart India Hackathon and in September we will seek problem statements from ministries and state governments. For the first time, we will ask industry people if they have any unsolved problems which they are seeking solutions for," Javadekar told the reporters.

"From October the students will be able to register. In the first edition of Hackathon, 40,000 students had participated. Last year, over 1 lakh students took part. We are expecting participation of around 1.5 lakh students this year," he added.

In order to engage the youth in coming up with digital solutions for common problems, the All India Council for Technical Education under the aegis of HRD ministry, had launched the hackathon in April, 2017. Twenty nine departments under various ministries presented 598 problem statements for which they did not have digital solutions.

"Smart India Hackathon is a non-stop digital product development competition, where problems are posed to technology students for innovative solutions. "It harnesses creativity and expertise of students, sparks institute-level hackathons, builds funnel for start-up India campaign, crowd sources solutions for improving governance and quality of life and provides opportunity to citizens to provide innovative solutions to India's daunting problems," a senior HRD official said.

PTI