Two engineering colleges to host Smart India Hackathon

Coimbatore: Two technical institutions here will host the software edition of the Smart India Hackathon 2020 organised by the ministry of human resource development (MHRD) for three days from Saturday.
Due to the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, it will be a virtual contest.
The two virtual nodal centres at Hindusthan College of Engineering and Technology and Sri Krishna college of Engineering and Technology here will respectively host 26 and 28 teams from across the country. Each team will have six students, who will write code to solve problems posed by the government of Bihar and the departments of financial services, and science and technology.
The teams will be brought together on communication platform Slack.
“As many as 1,000 teams across the country will participate in the hackathon, for which 40 nodal centres have been set up. Of these six centres in the state, two are in Coimbatore,” said K P Dhanabalakrishnan, a representative of Hindustan Group of Institutions.
Two student teams from here will visit the venue at Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology, while the other teams from across the country will log in to the event, said principal J Janet. “We have arranged transportation for those students. This will be the fourth consecutive year we are hosting the hackathon,” she said.
Union minister for human resource development Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank will inaugurate the hackathon in New Delhi. Prime minister Narendra Modi will interact with the participants through video conferencing on Saturday evening. Each winning solution will be given Rs 1lakh.