Over 200 engineering students and enthusiasts from varying backgrounds took part in this year’s Hackathon. The event was aimed to solve some of the challenges being faced in India, and was held over 24 hours at the Google campus in Bangalore, India and in California, USA. Aside from The Akshaya Patra Foundation, some of the well-known organisations that tied up with Code for India for the event were NASSCOM, Amnesty International, World Bank Group Finances and Action for India.
The purpose behind this year’s Hackathon was to create technology based applications that will help Indian organisations address social problems. Explaining this to the participants, key note Speaker Narayan Murthy said, "Design a solution that will help a large number of NGOs attack meta problems they need to solve with the power of your applications and make the life of millions of people better by using the algorithms effectively."
Interestingly many engineers were keen on addressing the challenges faced by Akshaya Patra, indicating that these were interesting to the participants. One challenge was to create an application or software that calculated the optimal route from the kitchens to schools avoiding issues like traffic pileups, bad road connectivity etc. Another challenge was to calculate the number of meals required by each region based on their historical data to avoid both wastage and storage of the food.
The concepts discussed in this year’s Hackathon have been an inspiration for the further innovation that can be expected in the days to come. By hosting programmes like this that combine the creativity of the public with the need for social welfare, Code for India has taken a step in the right direction to address the issues facing the Indian society today.
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