Code for India projects: PM Modi, Sundar Pichai, CP Gurnani encourage new ideas

tech2 News StaffSep 28, 2015 15:58:21 IST

The Code for India Hackathon 2015 was organised overnight at Google HQ, Mountain View, and a parallel event took place in India at Tech Mahindra, Noida today.

As said earlier today, PM Modi who is on his second US visit this year was present during the closing keynote, addressing the techies at the Code For India Hackathon.

In his speech Modi thanked the participants for the hard work to find solutions to the various problems.

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As time passes, the right use of technology will quantitatively improve our lives, he added. He also spoke about how Indian railways are teaming up with Google to bring Internet to 500 railway stations.

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The the event, Google chief Sundar Pichai also spoke about the company teaming up with the Indian Railways and emphasised on how Chrome topped the charts in India, before it became the most widely used browser across the world.

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The overnight Hackathon at the Google HQ was in honour of PM's visit to Silicon Valley and aims at his flagship initiatives - Digital India and Skilled India. It involves over 200 software engineers from Google's Mountain View base and around 160 at the Tech Mahindra office, Noida.

Solutions by applicants were judged based on technical accomplishment, creativity, design, and of course, how effectively it solved the challenge problem. Those with unique solution and cross-continental collaboration can gain additional points.

The winners were announced by the end of the day.

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Present at the closing keynote, CP Gurnani of Tech Mahindra spoke about PM's Digital India initiative.

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At the hackathon, we inetracted with a few teams and came across some really helpful and  interesting projects:

What stole the show was the group of 9th graders who were coding to build an app to help save food at mid-day meals at Akshay Patra.

The web solution was built by 13-year old Jeet Mitra and Pratikaditya Das who are in Class 9th at The Shriram Millennium School, 17-year old Aman Agarwal from Amity International School and 19-year old Dev Bhatnagar from Amity University.

The web solution aimed at removing the existing manual system of collecting data, which will eventually result into putting an end to all the food wastage.

"Akshaya Patra’s mid-day meals will be accompanied by this feature which will now allow them to give the child his required nutrition per their age, and give the exact servings required by the school, back to the foundation’s kitchens, where they’ll prepare the exact quantities for the children," explained Pratikaditya Das.

"This will mean that all teachers have to do is log onto their devices, access the webpage,enter the number of children present,and the program will output the number of servings one child will require, depending upon their age and choices of the day, and send the gross values to the kitchens,thus the kitchens know exactly how much food to prepare," he further added.

A solution to combat a similar challenge came from Chavi Gupta and team from Delhi Technological University also worked on food prediction for Akshaya Patra organisation's kitchens. The Android app dubbed Bhog is a prediction app that tells you how much food would be required to serve during mid-day meals to avoid wastage and also the erros that come with manual calculation.

At the hackathon, we also saw how Internet of Things is moving at a fast pace. One such was air quality monitoring project by Rishabh Banga, Intel Software Innovator. "I have created an Air Quality Box, that is a compact portable solution for monitoring Air quality as well as various other parameters like Temperature, Humidity, Dust Concentration, and Pressure," Banga explained.

"I even went ahead and integrated the functionality of Fire Detection as well as detecting levels of different gases present in the air, thereby making it completely sufficient for the purpose of monitoring air quality. This with integrated cloud connectivity so that the data collected is available for analysis of multiple stations and data levels to determine pollution source," he further added.

Krishi Samadhan Android app by a trio - Naman Sancheti, Ashutosh Goel and Ashutosh Singh - uses GPS to find the farmer's location and presents data for his state such as soil quality, irrigation required, fertilizer advice and so on. "It also lets the user calculate the N-P-K value i.e the Nitrogen, Phosphate and Potassium ratio based on the data input by the farmer," Sancheti tells us.

Aimed at child safety, Upendra Ghintala, Ujjwal Wahi and Amit Tiwari build an Android app - Amber Alerts. It is a solution towards finding lost children. It will work in co-ordination with NGOs, polic stations and so on. The whole network can work like citizen police to search or provide information about a missing child from a locality.