ICAR Invites Applications for National Hackathon “KRITAGYA” by 10th October

National Agricultural Higher Education Project (NAHEP) with the help of Animal Science Division, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) is going to organise 'Hackathon 2.0 KRITAGYA ' in connection with 'Promoting Innovation for Precision and Economical Animal Farming'. This event will be organized under the guidance of Union Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Minister Narendra Singh Tomar. 

Challenges in Animal Husbandry: 

Dr. R.C. Aggarwal ,Deputy Director General (Education),ICAR said that increasing hard work in animal husbandry, inaccurate estimates regarding livestock and poultry diseases, lack of technological devices in reporting diseases, delay in diagnosis, non-availability of suitable technologies in animal transport etc. are some of the emerging challenges, which the livestock sector has faced over the past few decades.

India is in a position where it needs to find ways not only to encourage technology enabled livestock management but also to ensure effective adoption of such emerging technologies.  

Dr. Aggarwal said that KRITAGYA can be defined as follows: Kri means agriculture, TA means technology and GYA means knowledge. Students, faculty and innovators/ entrepreneurs from universities/technical institutes across the country can participate in this program as a group.  

Kritagya – Hackathon 2.0: 

The group shall consist of a maximum of 4 participants, with not more than one faculty member and/or not more than one innovator or entrepreneur. Participating students can collaborate with students from local start-ups, institutes of technology and win up to Rs.5 lakh. The registration for this program is from 15th Sep. to 10th Oct. 2021. 

During the year 2020-21, NAHEP in collaboration with Agricultural Engineering Division of ICAR organized Hackathon 1.0 to promote innovation in farm mechanization. It received a great response across the country, where more than 784 teams (3 thousand participants) actively participated in the event.  

Out of the selected teams for the National level KRITAGYA Agtech Hackathon 2020-21, 4 teams were awarded with a cash prize of Rs.9 lakh. The event was organized by ICAR in collaboration with Agribusiness Incubators, MSMEs and other investors to help the winners for their concept proposals, its scalability and further development in future planning. 

ICAR launched NAHEP in November 2017 with the assistance of World Bank. The overall objective of NAHEP is to assist participating agricultural universities and ICARs in providing more relevant and higher quality education to students.  

Detailed information regarding registration and participation is available at:   https://nahep.icar.gov.in/Kritagya.aspx