36-hour Manipal Hackathon gets underway

Team Udayavani, Oct 11, 2019, 7:10 PM IST

Manipal: The first edition of Manipal Hackathon was inaugurated at the KEF R&D Auditorium on Friday. The event being organised by the Student Council of Manipal Institute of Technology, MAHE has finalists from institutes all over the country including BITS Hyderabad, VIT Vellore, VIT Chennai, and PICT Pune.

The chief guest, Mr G Jagadeesha, Udupi Deputy Commissioner and District Magistrate. He congratulated the students for their efforts in making the event a success, and also spoke about the need to organise more events such as the Hackathon.

Dr HS Ballal, Pro-Chancellor MAHE, in his address, talked about the importance of promoting and encouraging innovation while also stressing on the need of using technology to uplift the rural people and to empower women. Also present was MIT Joint Director, Dr BHV Pai.

The Manipal Hackathon is a software challenge that began in May 2019. Inspired by the Smart India Hackathon, it aims to find answers to pertinent social issues by using simple programming solutions. Initially, the competition had 1500 participants from across the country. Of these, 125 participants eventually made it Manipal for the 36-hour final challenge.