• Smart India Hackathon is a nationwide initiative to provide students with a platform to solve some of the pressing problems we face in our daily lives, and thus inculcate a culture of product innovation and a mindset of problem-solving.
• The first three editions SIH2017, SIH2018 and SIH2019 proved to be extremely successful in promoting innovation out-of-the-box thinking in young minds, especially engineering students across India.

Key highlights

• Smart hackathon 2020 is the biggest and first ever virtual hackathon due to covid-19 pandemic.
• The major focus of this event was mass level participation from different parts of the country.
• Different types of solutions are coming forward in the field of Agriculture, healthcare, women welfare etc. which can become future innovative solutions for long term.
• The hackathon is completely based on the public-private-partnership (PPP) model.
• Certain innovations like ease of policing via use of artificial intelligence, virtual police station, reusable cloth sanitary napkins, etc. were coming forward reflecting the innovative mindset of the students.
• Patents can be filed by students for the various solutions as well as provision for joint IP partners is envisioned.

What needs to be done ahead ?

• There are certain challenges like longevity of solution, the perpetuity of the project needs to be addressed.
• Colleges can conduct an internal hackathon in order to boost the students.
• The solutions can be made available all over the country which can be used for solving existing and new problems.

Related initiatives

Innovation cell of MHRD 

• The Ministry of Human Resource Development has established ‘MHRD’s Innovation Cell (MIC)’ with the mandate to work closely with our Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to encourage the creative energy of our student population to work on new ideas and innovation and promote them to create start-ups and entrepreneurial ventures.
• MIC will focus on creating a complete ecosystem which will foster the culture of Innovation across all educational institutions from ideas generation to pre-incubation, incubation and graduating from the incubator as successful start-ups. 
• MIC will also work on designing ranking systems to identify institutions in the forefront of innovation.

References:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmVylBzlIBQ&list=PLcDghvQhYD9IOCPeVG4pQvLDCuTCit_D8&index=3
2. https://www.sih.gov.in/sih2020https://mic.gov.in/About_MHRDnnovation.php