Hackathon ends, paves way for new ideas

The final turnout of the two-day Hackathon on the 12th Five Year Plan might not have been what the Planning Commission and National Innovation Council had in mind, but the results seem to have impressed the organisers and others involved. Despite the weariness or working non-stop for over 24 hours, most of the participants seemed excited about their creations and the new possibilities it opened up for them.  

At the centre in Delhi Universtity's South Campus, there were just five teams with multiple presentations. Vikas Bagri, one of the organisers, said overall number of entries from centres across the country would be known only later in the night. Many participants had failed to submit final entries for evaluation.

At IIT Delhi there were a total of 22 presentations. Organisers there said they were evaluating the response and would look at ways to incorporate a programme like this in the syllabus.

At DU, Team haXinth from New Delhi's St Stephen's College won the first prize in visualisation for their short film on the impact the 12th Plan and policies like Right to Education and Sarva Shiksha Abhyan would have on the lives of the country's children. With footage shot over the past 24 hours, peppered with data mined from the Plan document, the team easily had the best entry in the visualisation category. There was just one other short film to compete with.

It was clear that many of the entrants had failed to grasp the idea. Some of the visualisations were actually more difficult to understand than the Plan document itself. The standard in the app category was much better, with two Android and a web-based app contesting for the honours. But it seemed the judges were not that impressed and decided to give just one consolation price to Team Datawind's Science-o-pedia app. The e-learning app created by Amandeep Singh and Daler Kaur aims to take quality textual and video lessons to people who do not have easy access to them. Reports said some app entries at IIT Delhi had really impressed the judges and organisers.

At the DU centre, two teams from Jamia Millia Islamia also came up with apps. The Awaaz app created by Team Mass hoped to become a two-way communication medium between the government and the people, taking forward Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia's comment that the idea was to bring people to the Plan and not the other way round.

The other web app by Team JMI tried to give farmers an idea about price of commodities in nearby markets. "Apps can create a big impact if they are made with the rural sector in mind," said Vipul Nayyar, a second-year computer science student of JMI. However, he said there should have been more data on other commodities for their efforts to have been worthwhile.

Ashok Jain, a retired director of the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research who led the jury, said the participants were pioneers for something big. "This is the start of an excellent new programme. A bulk of the participants would not even have seen the Plan Document before this event. That itself is an achievement."

Another judge, Jane Schukoske, CEO of the S M Sehgal Foundation, said the best way to make someone learn something was to make them do activities based on it. "This way the exercise has been very successful."

Former bureaucrat Vinod Sood complemented the participants for their efforts. "Government documents are so voluminous and full of data that to go through them and do something meaningful in such a short time is a Herculean task in itself," he said.