29 Indian ministries participated
giving 598 problem statements to work on, 40,000 students from 2200
participating colleges submitted their 7531 ideas, 1266 selected ideas for the
finale, 402 evaluators across the globe shortlisted these ideas, 10,000 students
participated in the final hackathon, 26 nodal centers/cities in India where the
hackathon happened simultaneously for 36 hours, 50+ IT organizations provided
their mentors across India, 1700 mentors from academics/IT organizations worked
with these students to solve the problem statements given by ministries, 300+
ministry judges/mentors were present at these 26 locations, thousands of
staff/student volunteers worked day/night to make this mammoth task a reality…WOOF…what
a great team-work and the world’s biggest digital movement it was! We named it
Smart India Hackathon 2017.
The Smart India Hackathon 2017 was
envisioned for promoting innovation, out-of-the-box thinking in young minds, especially
engineering students of India. It was focused on the problems of social
importance as identified by 29 Ministries/Departments of Government of India.
The ideation and execution was mainly driven by i4c (http://www.i4c.co.in/) and Persistent System
Ltd. (https://www.persistent.com/). Orientation
and awareness programmes were conducted by AICTE (All India Council for
Technical Education - http://www.aicte-india.org/)
and i4C in 26 different cities to motivate students to participate in this
event. Ministry of HRD led the initiative through AICTE as the main anchor. The
Minister for HRD Shri Prakash Javadekar was the Chief Patron of the campaign.
What an experience it was for
whoever participated – be it students/staff, be it mentors/judges, be it
evaluators or be it organizers. Everyone got immensely benefitted through such
a massive and enriching experience. I still remember the day when I got
involved with this worldly initiative. It was scary to achieve something like
this being part of the organization committee. Initially, the response from the
students/colleges was not so encouraging but soon we could get the traction as
we started conducting the LIVE sessions for them. Initially we planned a few
sessions only but end up conducting close to 20 live sessions. I myself have
conducted four out of them. The response that we got from students through
these Facebook LIVE sessions was so much heartening. We heard the beats of the
young minds of India…
We were in no doubts that the
technology students from India are ready to make that big leap. Just in few
weeks we received 7531 ideas to solve the 598 problems given by the ministries.
Apart from this, students were so much more active on the social media, be it
Facebook, Twitter or blog posts and so on. We just had to be on our toes to
respond to this overwhelming student response. Evaluating these 7531 ideas was a mammoth task
as well. We involved many IT experts across the globe including the ministry
domain experts to evaluate these ideas. It was difficult to get everybody on
the same page as far as the evaluation process is concerned, them being distributed
across multiple locations / time zones in the world. Hats off to these 402
evaluators including my own team at Persistent LABS that we could get at least
9 opinions about each idea that was submitted. Thanks to all the hard work and
efforts put in by these evaluators that we could give justice to every single
idea and could select 1266 ideas in the stipulated short time.
After idea shortlisting, it was a
challenge to decide different locations for the final hackathon, organization
of the event at all these locations, set the process and educate different
centers to achieve the same experience throughout. Multiple chat sessions were
required to put everyone into the same context. It was a big challenge, right
from identifying the center coordinators to actual seamless execution till the
end. It was god’s grace that we could find the mindful people who helped us
make this happen. There were multiple rounds that took us to decide the
programme schedule, final evaluation process, identifying and finalizing judges
etc. So much detailing went into planning from what should happen at what time
including the food for students, yoga/Zumba sessions to mentoring at the venue.
Dr. Abhay Jere, Persistent LABS head, is the pivotal person for everything
related to this initiative. He made everyone sail through this whole movement.
The grand finale begun at 7 am on
1st April 2017 and closure happened on 2nd April around 9
pm. Though it was too exhaustive for the participants as well as organizers to
hold for these non-stop 36 hours, the energy in the air was so enthralling. No
one really could sleep for a minute during these 36 hours. Each one was so
involved being part of this nation building initiative. The energy got
amplified by n-folds when our honorable Prime Minister, Shri. Narendra Modi motivated
the aspiring innovators through video conference at 10 pm on the 1st
day. His LIVE interaction with students for about 44 minutes at night gave a
Midas touch to the whole effort. His tweets about the event made us really
proud and we could work effortlessly till the end sailing over the newly gained
dosage of fresh energy.
The best solutions that got
developed during the final hackathon were awarded @ INR 1 lakh, INR 75,000 and INR
50,000 for the top three teams respectively. Two more prizes have been given by
Persistent Systems Ltd. and Deloitte India. There are about 135 prizes
comprising of about INR 70 lakhs were handed over to the winning student teams.
This is not the end. Ministries
are ready to further fund the selective projects and convert them into finished
products. The effort will soon begin in the month of June this year and the
handover of these products and their actual use by the ministries is expected
to start by the year end. Smart India Hackathon 2017, not only tried harnessing
the creativity and expertise of the students, but also built the funnel for
'Startup India, Standup India'. These crowd sourced solutions will help
improving governance and quality of life, and provide young citizens of our
country an opportunity to co-create and present innovative solutions to India's
daunting problems for sure…
Author:
Vivek Kulkarni
Chief
Architect, Persistent System Ltd.
Twitter - https://twitter.com/v_d_k
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vivekkulkarni/
