All about the Indian Hackathon organized at MII Week
The Confederation of Indian Industry, IIT-Bombay and SAP jointly organized the India Hackathon, a week-long coding event, held at IIT-Bombay campus from 9-15 February. It was a part of the Make in India Week, Mumbai which was inaugurated by the Prime Minister of India, Mr. Narendra Modi.
The event saw the industry and academia coming up together with ideas that could solve the urban design problems of water, energy and transportation. The participants included coders, engineers and designers from various colleges and institutes.

The registrations started for this grand event on 4th January and had thousands of entries and many interesting proposals from engineering students across the country. The USP of this event was that it wasn’t just restricted to IITs and was made open for students from other universities to express their ideas.

Hackathon was live streamed on the 16th of February letting everyone be a part of it.
A team of venture capitalists and government representatives announced six winners out of 30 participating teams.
IIT Kanpur held the top spot in the energy category, while Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai campus and Karpagam College of Engineering, Coimbatore shared the honours for the second spot.

A team of two computer science students from Mumbai-based Vivekanand Education Society’s Institute of Technology won the first prize in the water solutions category. The team proposed a low-cost irrigation set for farmers affected by drought in the country.
Harsh Gupta and Nirbhay Pherwani made a subsurface irrigation model which has a sensor-based crop prediction system. The sensors detect salinity, water content, etc., and provide data on these parameters to help predict crop growth, survival chances, yield, etc. The information collected by this system is periodically sent to the farmers through text messages. This will enable the farmers to change their methods accordingly.

The transportation segment had Krishna Institute of Engineering and Technology, Ghazia bagging the top spot.

It’s important to invent and innovate design in India to be a great manufacturing nation. This event was a great start as IITs and engineering institutes will play an important role in achieving the big dream. We hope we have more of such things happening in our country in the near future.