Smart India Hackathon 2018 - Solving Agricultural Problems Smartly

The Smart India Hackathon 2018 focusses to develop innovative solutions for the various set of problems and challenges not only from various central ministries but also from state governments and some extent from industries and society as well.

About 27 Central Government Ministries and 18 State Governments have come together and posted 408 problem statements to the students participating in this grand initiative.  More than 105234 students registered. 17539 ideas were received from technical institutions in India.

The Grand Finale of Smart India Hackathon (SIH) 2018 for problem statements shortlisted by ICAR was organized during 30-31 March 2018 at Chandigarh Group of Colleges, Chandigarh. The event was jointly hosted by Department of Agricultural Research and Education and Department of Agriculture Cooperation & Farmers Welfare, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare.

The Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi addressed and interacted with the participants of SIH 2018 through video conferencing on 30^th March 2018.

Forty-seven teams comprising of six undergraduate B. Tech Students and two mentors participated in the Grand Finale of SIH 2018 for providing solutions to the following problem statements:

- Technology to enable seamless marketing of agri commodities beyond the current geographic clusters

- Translate weather information to very actionable advisory to farmers

- Real time identification of crops, weeds, diseases and pest damage and nutrient deficiency symptoms

- Development of a multilingual Mobile App for deep sea fishermen

- Marketing network for agricultural commodities for the benefit of producer and consumer

- Forewarning system for disease/pest attack for different commodities in different agro-climatic zones.

In the SIH 2018, the teams worked for continuous 36 hours and exposed to three rounds of mentoring and judging by the team of judges consisting of ICAR scientists and IT industry experts. After the three rounds of judging, 10 teams were selected for the power judging round wherein all the teams presented their software and finally three teams were awarded with the cash prize of Rs. 1 Lakh, 75k, 50k respectively.

AICTE under the aegis of MHRD, NIC, and MyGov launched Smart India Hackathon 2018 on October 16, 2017.

Chander Mohan

Krishi Jagran/New Delhi