The Tamil Nadu Skill Development Corporation (TNSDC) is organising a hackathon for engineering students across the State to encourage innovation among youth. Called ‘Naan Mudhalvan Niral Thiruvizha’, the hackathon will be executed with the support of Anna University.
The hackathon is open to the final year students of all engineering colleges from government colleges, government-aided colleges, government autonomous colleges, University constituent colleges, self-financing autonomous colleges and self-financing non-autonomous colleges. Students will take up this programme with 12-credits as project work in their final semester. Over one lakh students are expected to participate in this event.
“We are doing this to help engineering students get hands-on experience to industry problems,” said J. Innocent Divya, Managing Director of TNSDC. “The Entrepreneurship Development and Innovation Institute (EDII) supported this event by conducting workshops across all 38 districts to identify problem statements and to prepare faculty mentors to guide students throughout this process,” she added. She further said, “We have collected problem statements from the industry and the government — and now the students will have to find solutions to it.”
The hackathon will revolve around 10 selected themes that encompass a wide range of challenges faced by Tamil Nadu government departments. The themes include Agritech and Food Technology, Clean and Green Technology, Waste Management, Water and Soil Conservation, Education 4.0, Renewable and Sustainable Energy, Smart Town/City, Health/Med – Tech, Industry 4.0 and Heritage and Culture.
Each selected project idea (top 1,000 projects) will get a grant of ₹10,000 to build the prototype and timeline to be mapped accordingly to complete the projects by end of April 2024. Once the 1,000 ideas are shortlisted, provisional sanction order from Anna University will be issued to them and the respective institution will monitor and periodically conduct reviews of the projects. The respective institution will be responsible for the completion of the project and fund utilisation. And top 50 projects will be selected for an innovation voucher funding of ₹1 lakh for each team. The online registrations for the hackathon will be open from this week.
