What it’s really like to compete in SIH — the application process, the onsite round, what we built, and what I wish I’d known going in.
Updated 2025 — originally published May 2019
The first edition of Smart India Hackathon in 2017 was chaotic, exhausting, and one of the most formative experiences of my early research career. Here’s what happened, what I learned, and what students entering hackathons today should know.
It was 2017. I was a third-year engineering student at Kalyani Government Engineering College, West Bengal, and a group of us — Team “BreakThrough” — had just been selected to represent our college at the Smart India Hackathon onsite regionals, hosted at Sri Krishna Engineering College, Coimbatore. We were going to build a bird monitoring application for the Ministry of Environment in 36 hours.
I’m writing this in 2025, having since published research papers at international venues, completed an MS and PhD at IIT Kharagpur, and worked at labs in Germany, India, and the US. Looking back, SIH 2017 taught me several things that shaped how I approach research and engineering challenges even today.
Table of Contents
- What Is Smart India Hackathon?
- The Application Process (Round 1)
- The Onsite Round: Structure and Judging
- Our Project: Migratory Bird Population Monitoring
- Personal Reflections and Lessons Learned
- How SIH Has Evolved Since 2017
- Should You Participate? My Honest Advice
What Is Smart India Hackathon?
Smart India Hackathon (SIH) is a national-level student hackathon organized by the Government of India, specifically the Ministry of Education (formerly HRD). First launched in 2017, it has since grown into one of the largest hackathons in the world by participation.
Key characteristics:
- Open to all college students across India (teams of 5–6 members)
- Problem statements are submitted by Central Government departments, PSUs, and private companies
- Two formats: Software Edition (software/web/mobile applications) and Hardware Edition (physical prototypes)
- Two rounds: online submission and onsite hackathon (36–48 hours)
- Winners receive cash prizes and often get to present to the department that submitted the problem
The unique aspect of SIH compared to other hackathons is that the problems are real government needs — not toy problems, but genuine challenges that the winning solutions could actually be deployed for. This raises both the stakes and the motivation.
The Application Process (Round 1): Proposal Submission
In Round 1, teams browse the problem statements on the SIH portal and submit a detailed proposal for 2–3 problems they want to address.
The proposal must include:
- Methodology: A step-by-step plan for how you’ll tackle the problem, with a realistic timeline
- Use-case diagram: A UML diagram showing actors, actions, and relationships in your proposed system
- Technology stack: The specific tools, languages, frameworks, and APIs you’ll use
- Proof of Concept: Screenshots or a demo of a preliminary working model
Our team submitted proposals for two problems:
- Bag Tracking and Alert System for the Department of Posts, Ministry of Communications [PDF]
- Monitoring Migratory Bird Population in India for the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change [PDF]
Our second proposal — the bird monitoring system — was selected.
Lessons from Round 1:
- Be specific in your methodology. Vague proposals don’t get selected. Committees want to see that you’ve thought through the technical feasibility.
- The Proof of Concept matters more than you think. Even a rough working demo carries significantly more weight than slides describing what you plan to build.
- Choose problems at the intersection of your skills and genuine interest. You’ll spend 36 hours on it — pick something you care about.
The Onsite Round: Structure and Judging
The onsite hackathon was held at Sri Krishna Engineering College, Coimbatore. All teams working on problems for the Ministry of Environment were co-located in the same venue.
Structure:
- 36 hours of continuous development
- 3 rounds of evaluation, with a completely different panel of judges in each round
- Continuous mentorship available (we had an industry mentor assigned to our team — one of the best features of SIH)
What judges evaluated:
- Utility and real-world applicability of the solution
- Novelty — how different is it from existing systems?
- Technical robustness — does it actually work?
- Presentation quality and ability to answer technical questions
In our case, the judges were particularly interested in our map interface — a visual dashboard showing bird migration patterns and population density across India. This was the novel component that differentiated our solution from a simple database.
Our Project: Migratory Bird Population Monitoring
Our system aimed to solve a real problem: India hosts hundreds of migratory bird species, but tracking their populations is largely manual and fragmented across different forest departments and NGOs. Our application proposed:
- Citizen Science Data Collection: A mobile app for birdwatchers to submit sightings with GPS coordinates, species identification, and count
- Data Aggregation: A backend pipeline that validated, cleaned, and stored sightings in a structured database
- Interactive Map Interface: A web dashboard visualizing population density, migration routes, and temporal trends
- Analytics Module: Charts and trend analysis for forest department officials to monitor population changes year-over-year
Given 36 hours, we built a functional prototype of the mobile app and web dashboard. The map interface worked. The backend could ingest and display data.
Team BreakThrough at SIH
Personal Reflections and Lessons Learned
What went well:
- Our mentor was genuinely helpful. His industry experience helped us prioritize features and cut scope intelligently. This mentorship model was SIH’s best feature.
- The team dynamics were strong. We’d worked together before, which eliminated a lot of the early coordination friction that other teams visibly struggled with.
- The map interface generated real excitement from judges — novelty in the UI matters.
What was hard:
- The changing judge panel across three rounds was genuinely difficult to navigate. Each panel had different priorities. Feedback from Round 1 judges (“make the analytics more detailed”) conflicted with feedback from Round 2 judges (“simplify the interface”). Managing these contradictions under time pressure was stressful.
- 36-hour hackathons are physically brutal. Sleep deprivation affects code quality, judgment, and presentation ability. Plan your team’s rest schedule before you arrive.
- Post-hackathon follow-through was limited. After the event, we submitted our source code as required, but there was no further communication or collaboration with the Ministry. This is a structural weakness of the SIH model that has been partially addressed in later editions.
The most valuable lesson: Presenting unfinished work is a skill. At SIH, you’re always presenting something incomplete. Learning to honestly represent what works, what doesn’t, and what you’ll build next — without over-promising — is directly applicable to conference presentations and thesis defenses.
How SIH Has Evolved Since 2017
SIH has grown significantly from its first edition:
- Scale: SIH 2023 had over 1 million registered students across 9,000+ teams
- Hardware Edition added: Now runs parallel software and hardware tracks
- More industry problem statements: Private companies (not just government departments) now submit problems
- Better follow-through: Some winning solutions have been piloted by their respective ministries
- International editions: SIH has inspired similar programs in other countries
The core structure — real problems, intense teams, multiple judge panels — remains the same.
Should You Participate? My Honest Advice
Yes, if:
- You want to experience building something end-to-end under intense time pressure
- You want exposure to real government/industry problem statements
- You’re looking for a structured team experience before applying for research internships
- You want something notable on your CV beyond coursework
Manage these expectations:
- The judging is inconsistent. A great solution can be eliminated by a bad draw of judges. Don’t measure your technical ability by your SIH result.
- Winning is partly luck. Compete for the experience and the learning, not the prize.
- Post-hackathon deployment is rare. Treat the product as a learning exercise, not a startup launch.
SIH 2017 didn’t launch a product that’s in use today. But it taught me how to build fast, present under pressure, and navigate conflicting feedback from stakeholders — skills I use in every research paper I write.
If you competed in SIH and want to share your experience, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Links to resources: SIH website, SIH 2019 website
If you are new to Machine Learning or Data Science in general, you may find my article useful, where I talk about the technology stack required for building an end-to-end data science project from scratch.
It is a good idea to scope the conference venue where you wish to submit. I have written an article along that lines on “how to follow a top-tier conference” which may be a good starting point.
If you are new to writing papers using Latex for academic conferences, you can visit the following articles:- I cover how to setup up a Tex environment in your local machine (article link)
- Conference or journal paper template – individual files and how to use them (article link)
- How to correctly write references or perform cross-referencing while writing your paper (article link)
Discover more from Medical AI Insights
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.