The participants will have a late-night video interaction with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on their projects.

From 11 p.m. onwards on Apr 1, the Prime Minister will interact with the participants in the five centres- West Bengal, Coimbatore, Pune, Nagpur, Ahmadabad, Allahabad.

“While we are honoured to be chosen as a nodal centre, what has increased our joy is the fact that we have been chosen as one of the five centres across India where Prime Minister Narendra Modi will interacting via video conference with the participants and inspiring them to work towards making India digital,” said Simarpreet Singh, Director of JIS Group Educational Initiatives.

“The scale and reach of Smart India Hackathon 2017 is unprecedented, for the first time so many different ministries/departments have come together, and posted their 598 problems for students, seeking innovative solutions…. Through Smart India Hackathon we hope to create ‘world’s biggest open innovation model’ that other countries can replicate,” Union human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar had recently commented.

About 30 different government departments/ministries are involved as partners - like Ministry of Railways, External Affairs, Steel, Postal Services, Defence, ISRO, NCPCR, Mnistry of Tourism and Department of Atomic Energy. For the first time, government departments are directly engaging with students and challenging them to build digital solutions to improve their efficiency, plug revenue leakages and corruption.

The initiative has received ideas from 7531 teams from all over the country covering over 2100 institutes. AICTE had arranged 26 awareness workshops across India to sensitise  students about Smart India Hackathon 2017. The hackathon will be a pan-India 36-hour non-top digital programming competition. The participating teams will simultaneously compete from across 33 locations in India to offer digital yet sustainable innovative solutions to solve real-time challenges faced by the nation.

“In Bengal, Guru Nanak Institute of Technology has been chosen as the only nodal centre to host the event,” said AICTE Vice-Chairman M. P. Poonia. “While thousands of technology students are taking part in it across 26 nodal centres, those at GNIT will help solve the problems posed by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR),” Poonia added.

There will be multiple prizes worth Rs. 50 lakh for students, but more importantly, the HRD ministry hopes the participating ministries will adopt many of the products developed during the Grand Finale.

“While we have been selected as the only nodal centre from Bengal, our students too have made it to the Hackathon final and are going to Pune as participants,” said Sila Singh Ghosh, vice-president of corporate relations, JIS Group.

The ministries feel that this hackathon will certainly be the world’s largest hackathon till date and hopes that the initiative also enters into Guinness Book of World Records and Limca Book of Records.