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 four editions SIH2017, SIH2018, SIH2019, SIH2020 and SIH2022 proved to be extremely successful in promoting innovation out-of-the-box thinking in young minds, especially engineering students from across India.

SIH 2023 commenced with the registration process, where our university registered in the portal. We were initially asked to conduct an internal hackathon and select 40 teams. Out of 80+ SNU Chennai teams, 40 teams were shortlisted from the internal hackathon. These teams uploaded their proposed idea on the SIH portal. After the external shortlisting, only one team (AIviate) from SNUC made it to the Grand Finale for the software edition, proposed to happen on 19th and 20th December 2023. The problem statement chosen by this team was “AI based alarm generation and payload dropping using drones” which was given by the Ministry of Defence for Disaster recovery. Under this problem statement, 6 teams from different colleges/universities were shortlisted for the finale.

The venue allotted for the grand finale to this team was Kolhapur Institute of Technology (KIT) Campus in Kolhapur, Maharashtra. Under each problem statement, there were 5-6 teams competing for a prize money of Rs. 1 lakh. The event started with an inaugural function done by the nodal centre followed by overall kick-off for the SIH centrally.

There were two rounds of mentoring and three rounds of evaluation. We had gone with an initial prototype with certain ideas in mind as this problem statement also had a hardware component associated. The coding kickstarted on 19th December at 10 am. However, in the first round of mentoring, the jury members had set the context and told us what they are expecting in this problem statement.

Based on that, our team started working on certain specific functionalities. During the second round of evaluation, the students showed a demo with partially completed work. The jury members were impressed with the concepts that we proposed. They gave a couple of additional functions to be implemented before the final evaluation.

After 30+ hours of rigorous coding and hardware implementation, at 5.30 pm on 20th December, the final evaluation session commenced. The students presented the overall idea, what was unique in the work and how the solution would be effective for the given problem statement. The team then demonstrated the entire solution with almost all the required functionalities along with the additional requirements given by the jury members which left them impressed and happy. The students answered all the questions very enthusiastically.

Finally the prize distribution ceremony started around 8 pm and under each category the winners were announced. Under our problem statement, we emerged the winners bagging a prize money of Rs. 1 lakh along with a winners trophy.