New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be addressing the students taking part in the grand finale of Smart India Hackathon (SIH) on Thursday via video-conferencing, news agency PTI reported.
Speaking at a press conference, Union Minister of State for Education Subhas Sarkar said, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been interacting with the student participants of the Smart India Hackathon every year since its inception and he is expected to interact with the students even this year at 8 pm on August 25.”
Launched in 2017, SIH is a nationwide initiative to provide students a platform to solve the pressing problems of society, organisations, and government. The objective of the initiative is to inculcate the culture of product innovation, problem-solving and out-of-the-box thinking among students.
Notably, over 15,000 students and mentors will be travelling to 75 nodal centres to take part in this year’s SIH grand finale.
According to the report, students from over 2,900 schools and 2,200 higher education institutions will handle 476 problem statements from across 53 Union ministries in the SIH finale, including optical character recognition (OCR) of temple inscriptions and translations in Devanagari scripts, IoT-enabled risk monitoring system in cold supply chain for perishable food items, high-resolution 3D model of terrain, and infrastructure and roads conditions in disaster struck areas.
"The scope of the Smart India Hackathon has been widening with every passing year, since its launch in 2017. The increased enthusiasm among participating students and problem statement providing organisations could be seen in their growing participation over the years. Every year, SIH is impacting lakhs of students and provides them with a national platform to test their educational learning for solving real-world challenges," PTI quoted Sarkar as saying.
"It also aligns their interest toward innovation and entrepreneurship. A total of 476 problem statements were received from 53 government organisations for the SIH this year. The winner teams of institute level hackathons organised under Smart India Hackathon 2022, comprising more than 15,000 students, will participate in this year's SIH grand finale at national level. These teams will travel to the assigned nodal centre and will work on these problem statements during grand finale," he added.
It is to be noted that SIH hardware grand finale is scheduled from August 25 to 29 and the software grand finale will be held from August 25 to 26.
Each year SIH is conducted at various nodal centres and this year, as part of 'Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav' celebrations, the Ministry of Education's Innovation Cell and All India Council for Technical Education have identified 75 higher educational institutes and incubators as the nodal centres to host the participants.
"At each nodal centre, an officer designated by the Ministry of Education's Innovation Cell will monitor and preside over the proceeding during the entire duration of SIH grand finale. The participation of females in the Smart India hackathon is also very impressive. The male to female ratio of participants that are travelling to the nodal centres for the hackathon grand finale is almost 1.5:1," Sarkar said.
"SIH has seen a four-fold growth in the number of teams registering from around 7,500 in the first edition to about 29,600 in the ongoing fifth edition," he added.
The SIH winners on each problem statement will be awarded a prize amount of Rs 1 lakh. Under the category of student innovation, three prizes of Rs 1 lakh, Rs 75,000 and Rs 50,000 will be awarded to the winning teams.