Team Champions_Sam and Team Prajjawala, IIT Bhubaneswar secure First and Third Prizes at Smart Hackathon 2019

Innovation and entrepreneurship are at the peak in India. In order to make development a comprehensive mass movement and innovate on all fronts, MHRD, AICTE, i4c and Persistent Systems have come together to organise Smart India Hackathon (SIH) 2019 - a unique Open Innovation Model for identifying new and disruptive technology innovations to solve the challenges faced in our country.

Keeping with the tradition, 22 teams from IIT Bhubaneswar participated in the online round of SIH 2019 out of which 4 teams were shortlisted for the final round of Hackathon that lasted non-stop development of the projects for 36 hours. There were 11 themes on which various teams participated. These four teams travelled to different venues (Allapuzha, Kochi, Indore and Kolkata) to participate in the event.   

The first prize was awarded for a problem statement given by CISCO under Smart Communication theme to Swayam Sevak headed Champions-Sam, IIT Bhubaneswar (Aman Pratap Singh, Aditya Pal, Meghna Saha, Saksham Arneja, Madhav Tummala, Ankur Jaiswal) mentored by Dr. Joy Chandra Mukherjee.  The third prize was awarded for problem statement given by AICTE under Smart Communication theme to Team Prajjwala (Rahul Kumar, Avani Patidar, Mantri Harsh Rakesh, Muthaluru Chaitanya Shiva Kumar Reddy and Mrudhul Guda) mentored by Mohnish Chaterjee.

The other two teams Machalli Eleven 360 (Basant Kumar, Anand Prakash, Gourav Barnwal, Pawan Kumar Saini, Kumari Pratibha, Kumar Ankul) and Skywalkers (Rahul Tiwari, Kaustav Bhattacharya, Debjit Chattopadhyay, Shivam, Rahul Sabnani, Gauravi Pramod Kabadi) from IIT Bhubaneswar made it to the final round of the competition for other problem statements before getting eliminated.

This is indeed a proud moment for each one at IIT Bhubaneswar. Prof. R V Raja Kumar, Director complemented the teams for the first and third prizes and for reaching finals, and wished that participation and winning becomes a practice at the institute. The Director re-iterates that each faculty member of the institute should strive to foster innovative thinking and creativity amongst students, in class rooms, laboratories and beyond.

The first two editions SIH2017 and SIH2018 proved to be extremely successful in promoting innovation, out-of-the-box thinking in young minds, especially engineering students from across India. It's a non-stop product development competition, where problem statements are posed to technology students for innovative solutions.