PM Narendra Modi lauded student participants for flocking to Smart India Hackathon 2019

Inaugurated (through video conferencing) by Union minister Prakash Javadekar, it was a nationwide initiative mooted in 2017 to provide students a platform to solve some of pressing problems faced in daily lives, said the organisers.

The participants also got an opportunity to interact with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

He thanked the participants for their increasing interest in the programme, which received over two lakh entries this year, up from 30,000 in 2017.

There were seven challenging and complex problem statements related to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Machine Learning (ML) to be solved by 28 teams comprising over 196 students from different parts of the country.

The competition went on for continuous 36 hours.

Each team had eight members including two mentors.

Twelve judges from industry and academia evaluated the students in three rounds.

Amit Kumar Sinha, IPS, Director, Information Technology Development Agency, Government of Uttarakhand was the chief guest.

Also present were Prof. Ajit Kumar Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee, R. Shrinivasan, Vice President, KG Infosystems Pvt. Ltd, Shripad Agavekar, AICTE Representative, Prof. Manoranjan Parida, Dean SRIC, IIT Roorkee, Prof. Balasubramanian Raman, Head Institute Computer Center and Single Point of Contact (SPOC), IIT Roorkee.