PM Modi to address grand finale of 'Smart India Hackathon 2022'

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will virtually address the grand finale of 'Smart India Hackathon 2022' on August 25, an official said on Tuesday.

In a statement, the PMO said it has been the constant endeavour of the Prime Minister to promote a spirit of innovation in the country, especially among the youth.

"With this vision in mind, Smart India Hackathon (SIH) was started in the year 2017. SIH is a nationwide initiative to provide students a platform to solve the pressing problems of society, organisations, and government. It aims to inculcate the culture of product innovation, problem-solving and out-of-the-box thinking among students," the PMO said.

The growing popularity of SIH can be gauged from the fact that the number of teams registered for SIH has seen a four-fold growth from around 7,500 in the first edition to about 29,600 in the ongoing fifth edition.

This year, more than 15,000 students and mentors are travelling to the 75 nodal centres to take part in the SIH 2022 grand finale.

Students from over 2,900 schools and 2,200 Higher Education Institutions will tackle 476 problem statements from across 53 Union Ministries in the finale, including optical character recognition (OCR) of temple inscriptions and translations in Devanagari scripts, IoT-enabled risk monitoring system in cold supply chain for perishable food items, high-resolution 3D model of terrain, infrastructure and roads conditions in disaster struck areas, etc.

This year, Smart India Hackathon - Junior has also been introduced as a pilot for school students to build a culture of innovation and develop problem-solving attitude at the school level.