Bharat SainiLast Updated on May 25, 2018 by Bharat Saini
Smart India Hackathon-2108, country’s biggest digital programming contest, promoted by Ministry of Human Resource Development and AICTE to tap the talent of engineering students and to provide solutions to problems of various Ministries and Departments of the Central and State Governments, was hosted by CVR College of Engineering in Ibrahimpatnam near Hyderabad in Telangana. Its Grand Finale was addressed on March 30, 2018 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi by interacting with participants across various centres via video conferencing and while giving mantra of IPPP: Innovate, Patent, Produce and Prosper, he said, “These four steps will lead our country towards faster development, for that we will have to innovate and turn our innovations in patents, making our production smoother and taking products speedily to the people will make them prosper.” “Innovation has the power to overcome the challenges our world faces, we should think about how our innovation can transform the lives of our fellow citizens.” Prime Minister underlined the importance of Participative Governance to the participants and added that the biggest assets of any nation are Shram Shakti (labour) and Iccha Shakti (resolve), “Once the people decide to bring about change, everything is possible. But the biggest mistake governments make is to think that they alone can bring about change”. In the Grand Finale 1296 teams were selected out of more than 20000 teams in India.
Prime Minister highlighted various decisions by the Government to facilitate research and innovations which include:
- Introducing Modern Techniques based on Educational and Learning concepts in Atal Tinkering Labs to benefit Students of class 6thto 12th.
- Prime Minister Research Fellowship to around 1000 best students of BTech, MTech and MSc courses in institutes like IITs, IISc and NIT every year. These students will be given financial assistance of about 70-80 thousand rupees per month over a period of five years.
- Focus on providing greater autonomy to Higher Educational Institutions.
- Setting up of 20 World class Institute of Excellence.
Prime Minister cited an example to highlight how Make in India has become a brand and is now becoming popular across the world. He told that four years ago there were only two manufacturing units of mobile phones in India whereas today around 120 factories are operating in the country. There has been about threefold increase in Patent registrations as well as Trademarks registrations in comparison of the registration figures in 2013-14.
Smart India Hackathon, a unique initiative to identify new and disruptive digital technology innovations for solving the challenges faced by our country was organised for the first time in 2017 by MHRD, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), Inter Institutional Inclusive Innovation Centre (i4C), and Persistent Systems in order to work towards vision of Prime Minister, Narendra Modi who envisages a Digital India to bridge the digital divide in our country and further promote digital literacy in order to make development a comprehensive mass movement and put governance within everyone’s reach in India. Prime Minister expressing satisfaction while tweeted, “I am happy that over half the projects selected during last year’s Hackathon have been completed and more are nearing completion”, and further tweeted, “What our young minds are doing today will benefit the nation in the coming years”.
