Women shine at Smart India Hackathon at IIT Kharagpur

kharagpur — Coimbatore’s Whistling Cookers of Avinashilingam Deemed University for Women bagged a cash prize of Rs100,000 by winning the Smart India Hackathon 2018 - Hardware Edition on Friday.

The first runner-up was from the same college — Team Buddies. And the second runner-up was Team Askurvara from the Silicon Institute of Technology.

The winner and runners-up were all women’s team, a IIT Kharagpur release said. The two runner-ups were richer by Rs 75,000 and Rs 50,000 respectively.

SIH2018 - Hardware edition is the first-of-its-kind innovation challenge initiated by the Union Human Resource Development to provide a national platform to young technical minds of India to showcase their disruptive innovations and creative products which can bring about revolutionary changes in crucial sectors like agriculture,

health, clean water, waste management, automotive, smart communication, and education.

The event has seen unique student innovations in smart drip irrigation, technology-powered mechanical harvesters and soil testing, and cost-effective detection of the status of fruits and vegetables.

The winning team designed a prototype for “non-destructive estimation of sugar content of fruits using visible-light imaging”.

Prof. Partha Pratim Chakrabarti, Director, IIT Kharagpur and Chairman, SIH2018, said: “I

think innovation challenges such as SIH2018 are going to bring a new era in innovation and transform the process by which we teach engineering.”

The nine teams at IIT Kharagpur were judged by a jury made up of some of the top entrepreneurs and partners of leading business incubators in the agri-tech sector, such as a-IDEA, Omnivore, AgNext, Bharat Innovations Fund and Ankur Capital. Nine teams worked continuously for five consecutive days to build their hardware solutions as a working prototype. —