Smart India Hackathon or SIH is a national level 36 hours long competition where students from all over India build solutions for problem statements provided by the different Ministries of India as well as the Industry. Most of these problem statements provided are of utmost importance to the Industry/Ministry and have a great social impact. Motivating students, increasing the technical importance and building towards a digital India is the main motive of this hackathon.
I used to hear about the SIH winning stories of my seniors in college from where I got the curiosity to participate. When I got to know about 1st phase of SIH i.e. the internal hackathon from my college, I quickly formed a group of 6 people, namely Gryffindor- Parth Sharma, Kushalgautam, Sarthak Shukla, Anmol Srivastava, and Suyash Rastogi. The problem statement selection was the next step that needed to be taken. We all sat down and after scrolling through hundreds of them, we finally narrowed it down to DB887 by the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship — Farming equipment’s are expensive, leveraging unused equipment may add to additional income for the farmers.
In the internal hackathon, we were competing with 28 other teams in the software edition. At first, we had to pitch our solution to our college’s judge panel which consisted of some professors from the CSE department. Afterward, we started working on the prototype of the Internal Hackathon(within the college campus), which was the first step to qualifying for SIH.
And then, after 2 days, I received a list of 10 qualifying teams from our SPOC saying Congratulations who got selected to submit their final proposal for the SIH 2022. We just had a day to complete our application and submit our presentation and proposal. But we faced conflict with the team name while submitting the proposal as it was already taken. Then we had to come up quickly with the new team name. After thinking for almost half an hour, my friends Rishav Uppal and Parth Sharma suggested taking the initial letters of each team member’s name, and the name TEAM S.P.A.R.K.S. was coined. As the submission date got extended and we got the option for multiple submissions, I planned to submit the proposals for other problem statements to increase the chances of shortlisting our team. The results came up almost after one or two months and, as I checked the website, all we wished for was good news that we got selected for 2 problem statements for the Grand finals but none of the selected statements was the one on which we were working initially i.e. DB887. We need to choose one of the statements to participate in the grand finals. After a long discussion with my team, we decided to go with problem statement RS1079 by the Ministry of Finance — Upgradation of Jan-Dhan Darshak App.
This application acts as a guide for the common people in locating a financial service touch point at a given location in the country. While locator apps are a common feature for many individual banks and financial service providers, in this era of inter-operable banking services, Jan Dhan Darshak app will be in a unique position to provide a citizen centric platform for locating financial service touch points across all providers such as banks, post office, CSC, etc.
We again planned the teamwork in building the new prototype and started working on developing the app from scratch. Then various meetings and discussions were held within the team for building the solution. After 1 week, we got the nodal center details and we got so much excitement as we had been going to the Lovely Professional University, Phagwara. We needed customized matching t-shirts, standees, and train tickets for Punjab.
Our team arrived at the center on the afternoon of 24 August. We were very nervous but also very proud of ourselves for reaching this stage, but doing so made us even more determined to win the prize. We interacted with various students from different colleges and shared our journey. We charged our laptops for the next day in the evening. Finally, the big day arrived, and there were a lot of teams with fantastic projects and presentations. My teammates were all present at the desk at 9:00 a.m. Everybody had finished their breakfast. We discussed some issues I felt we had with the frontend part of the project. After the 1st round of mentoring, we were happy as we got an appreciation for our UI/UX design. But in another round of mentoring, we received some negative comments like our product contains almost similar features compared to google maps and nothing unique. We got disappointed and started working on researching additional features to improve our USP. We again pitched our solution to our judging panel during the 1st evaluation around 11.30 pm and committed to implementing all the proposed features till the morning.
We had spent the whole night at our desks for discussions and implementations of lots of new features. After the final round of evaluation, we were satisfied with our presentation and expected to be praised by the judges. The results were to be announced on 26th August 2022 around 8 pm. The closing ceremony began and we anxiously waited for the results. We were so much nervous as the winners of the problem statements were being announced but the moment we heard our team's name as the winner of the problem statement RS1079 and that feeling of receiving the cheque for 1lakh along with the winner trophy🏆 with my team on stage was unbelievable. We went crazy during those 2 days but it was all our hard work that paid off.
However, our journey would have been incomplete without our mentors — Archit Kaushik and Ajeet Kumar. They have guided us throughout our SIH journey. Ajeet sir helped us to improve a lot over UI/UX while Archit sir made us focus on the presentation as well as the features that we could offer. Also special thanks to my senior Pragati Verma for helping and supporting us during the hackathon.
If you enjoyed reading our way through Smart India Hackathon and do let us know your views in the comments. In case you want to connect with me, follow the links below:
