NASSCOM organizes smart city Hackathon in Bengaluru

BENGALURU: As part of its TechNgage initiative, The NIT Services Council (NITSC) organized a two-day hackathon between May 21 and 22, 2016 in Bengaluru. The event offered working professionals and students an opportunity to create solutions that provide citizens an intelligent and connected infrastructure to cater to various social needs to citizens in education, health and safety. With the theme Your CITY - SMART & SECURE, the hackathon will also be held in Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi-NCR and Kolkata.

NASSCOM says that the event aimed at helping India become the hub of innovation and to enthuse technologists to continuously evolve and become ‘World Class Techies’. The Council has identified several initiatives and TechNgage is part of one of the key initiatives - Celebrating Technology & Technologists. The hackathon had witnessed over 14,226 registrations already and top submissions focus on issues like: Citizen Services, Education and Healthcare.

The selected winners, along with cash prize of up to USD 15,000, will also get be conferred with a NASSCOM fellowship which will provide blanket passes to all major forums hosted by NASSCOM and access to all member-only research reports and material for 1 year. To help them hone their skills further, the winners will also be felicitated with an all-expense paid trip to Silicon Valley where they will get the opportunity to visits top technology companies for one week.

Commenting about the initiative, Sushma Rajagopalan, Chair, NASSCOM IT Services Council, said, “With TechNgage, we aimed to provide highly skilled people in the country a platform to support their budding innovations; which will play a massive role in the growth of the sector and development of the country. This hackathon is one step closer to that vision and looking at the number of registrations, we are confident that we are going to get ideas that are going to help us build a stronger technology enabled ecosystem.”

Samir Dhir, Member, NASSCOM IT Services Council stated that, “It’s heartening to see level of participation, quality of ideas and enthusiasm of talent in our country during Bangalore Techngage. We believe TechNgage provides the right platform for technologists in India to showcase their ideas and innovations and with help of NASSCOM transform lives of fellow citizens, demonstrate to world power of innovation from India & pave way for future technologists to build further.”