Two-day Smart India Hackathon 2018 to be held at nodal centres across India from 30 March

The grand finale of the **Smart India Hackathon** 2018 (Software Edition) will be held on 30 and 31 March  at 28 nodal centres across the country, Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Prakash Javadekar said on 22 March. [caption id=“attachment_4196153” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Image Credit: Smart India Hackathon[/caption] “This year’s initiative has software as well as hardware edition and includes participation from states. For SIH 2018, we have received participation from 27 Central ministries, departments and 17 state governments which have sent more than 900 problem statements,” he said. After scrutinising the problem statements, 408 problems (340 for software and 68 for hardware) were finally selected for the Hackathon and have been put out on MyGov platform. The final round of Software **Hackathon** will be conducted for continuous 36 hours. Smart India Hackathon, in its second edition, is the world’s largest nation-building digital initiative of the HRD Ministry and conceptualised to harness the creativity and energy of bright young students for the development of the nation, said the minister. “For SIH-2018, we have received more than 17,400 teams with participation of around one lakh students of engineering, management and MCA. These entries were scrutinised and now 1,296 entries are selected for the Grand Finale,” said Javadekar. He said he was hopeful that the solutions given by the students will be helpful in overcoming the challenges faced by various ministries and departments. Hardware Hackathon competition will be conducted in June. Around 8,000 students will attempt to give solutions for the listed 340 software problems. The HRD Ministry is also engaging with Department of Science and Technology (DST) to ensure that selected teams from SIH 2018 could be supported by Technology Business Incubators as Start-ups and DST has responded positively, he said. Some of the interesting projects of SIH developed by the students are a special pen drive to prevent data theft (for ISRO), airport crowd management system (for Air India) and a platform for North-East artefacts and a gaming solution for health benefits (for the Ministry of AYUSH). At least 27 projects will get implemented and adopted by different departments by the end of April or mid-May.