Smart India Hackathon 2018: Here are the problems the hackathon will attempt to fix next year

Persistent Systems, a Pune-based IT company is all set to organise Smart India Hackathon 2018 next year in collaboration with AICTE, MHRD and i4c. [caption id=“attachment_4196153” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Image Credit: Smart India Hackathon[/caption] The company announced that the event is scheduled to start at the beginning of 2018. The company did not confirm the dates of the event at the time of writing but confirmed that the upcoming event will be bigger in scale than the one conducted this year. The interesting thing to note here is the fact that State and Union Ministry in addition to other ministries and departments from central governments have sent a number of ‘problem statements’. The company claims that about 45 union ministries and departments including about 18 state governments have ‘joined the initiative’. This will help the government in ‘directly’ engaging with technical students and then challenge them to create digital solutions to improve their efficiency. According to the details on the event page, the Software edition will constitute of about 36 hours of ‘software product development competition’ while the Hardware Edition will have the teams work for 5 days to create their hardware solutions. Dr Anand Deshpande, Chairman and MD, Persistent Systems, Co-chairman of Smart India Hackathon 2018 issued a statement adding, “Thanks to the support we received from MHRD and AICTE, Smart India Hackathon which started as a simple idea sparked at Persistent Systems has now evolved into a nationwide movement. Encouraged by the splendid response to the inaugural edition we are delighted to launch the second edition of Smart India Hackathon.” [caption id=“attachment_4196151” align=“alignnone” width=“1589”] Image Credit: Smart India Hackathon[/caption] Further, Dr Abhay Jere, Secretary of the Organizing Committee for Smart India Hackathon 2018 added, “Smart India Hackathon is nothing short of a digital movement that collectively harnesses the creativity and skill of India’s technology students, towards developing a Digital India. We look forward to hosting a very successful Smart India Hackathon 2018, with tremendous student participation from across the country.” The company has made the ‘problem statements’ public aiming at finding solutions for these problems in the hackathon. Some of the statements include the development of a simple model to predict drought at a location, creating GPRS-guided SMART Wheel Chairs, telemedicine system, a system to identify ACS risk patient, and many others. You can visit the website to find out all the ‘problem statements’. The company has posted all the statements on its website.