Smart India Hackathon 2022: PM Narendra Modi to address Grand Finale on 25 August; 15,000 students to participate

Smart India Hackathon 2022: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the Grand Finale of Smart India Hackathon 2022 on 25 August at 8 PM via video conferencing. Students from over 2900 schools and 2200 Higher Education Institutions will tackle 476 problem statements from across 53 Union Ministries in the finale, according to a government release.

Smart India Hackathon (SIH) was started in the year 2017 in order to promote a spirit of innovation in the country, especially among the youth, the release said. SIH is a nationwide initiative to provide students a platform to solve the pressing problems of society, organisations, and government, it further said.

"It aims to inculcate the culture of product innovation, problem-solving and out-of-the-box thinking among students," the government release said.

The SIH has seen significant growth as the number of teams registered for SIH has seen a four-fold growth from around 7500 in the first edition to about 29,600 in the ongoing fifth edition, the release claimed.

"This year more than 15,000 students and mentors are travelling to the 75 nodal centres to take part in the SIH 2022 grand finale. Students from over 2900 schools and 2200 Higher Education Institutions will tackle 476 problem statements from across 53 Union Ministries in the finale, including Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of Temple inscriptions and translations in Devanagari Scripts, IoT-enabled risk monitoring system in Cold Supply Chain for perishable food items, High-resolution 3D model of terrain, infrastructure and roads conditions in disaster struck areas, etc," the release said.

This year, Smart India Hackathon - Junior has also been introduced as a pilot for school students to build a culture of innovation and develop problem-solving attitude at the school level.