Attending the Smart India Hackathon (SIH) 2025 as a jury member at Rajalakshmi Engineering College, representing the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), was a powerful reminder of how bold ideas, when given the right platform, can turn into tangible solutions for India. It was also deeply affirming to see so many young engineers, including many girls, step up with confidence, clarity, and ownership over the problems they were solving.
What SIH Is About
SIH is a nationwide, nonstop product development competition organized by the Ministry of Education’s Innovation Cell and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), where students work on real problem statements from government departments, industry, and NGOs.
Started in 2017, it has now grown into one of the world’s largest open innovation platforms, with the 2025 edition engaging tens of thousands of students across 60+ nodal centers in a 36-hour grand finale.
The 2025 edition focused on themes such as AI, clean energy, medtech, agriculture, cybersecurity, space tech, and digital public services, aligning strongly with the Viksit Bharat @2047 vision of a more innovative, self-reliant India. By bringing together students, mentors, experts, and juries under one roof, SIH creates a live laboratory where classroom learning meets real-world constraints, users, and impact.
Why SIH Matters
SIH shifts students from “marks and exams” to “problems and solutions,” giving them exposure to actual societal and industrial challenges early in their careers. It builds not just technical depth, but also teamwork, communication, resilience under pressure, and the ability to iterate quickly based on feedback.
At a national level, SIH acts as a pipeline for innovation, feeding ideas into startups, incubators, and government programs, especially in priority areas like sustainability, health care, and digital transformation. Several winning solutions from previous editions have gone on to become deployable tools and products, demonstrating that hackathons, when designed well, can seed long-term impact rather than just being one-off events.
Photos from the 2025 Smart India Hackathon
My Experience as a Jury Member
Sitting on the jury at Rajalakshmi Engineering College, it was energizing to watch teams move from problem understanding to demos, often within incredibly tight timelines. The maturity with which many teams approached user needs, data limitations, and deployment constraints was impressive, and the conversations often felt closer to design reviews in a startup than to student evaluations.
Representing SWE added an extra layer of meaning: it was encouraging to see women students leading teams, owning architectures, and defending design choices with confidence. The visibility of women in technical leadership roles, both on the judging panel and among participants, felt like an important cultural shift, and it underscored how platforms like SIH and organizations like SWE can work together to normalize women’s presence in high-impact tech spaces.
Takeaways and Gratitude
A few things stayed with me:
- The best teams were the ones that combined solid engineering with empathy for the end user, not just fancy tech stacks.
- Mentorship and timely feedback clearly shaped solution quality. I could see the difference when teams had been coached to think beyond the “hackathon demo.”
I’m grateful to Rajalakshmi Engineering College for hosting such a well-organized SIH nodal centre, and to SWE for the opportunity to represent a community that actively champions women in engineering.
Walking out of the venue, the dominant feeling was optimism — a sense that if this is the kind of talent and intent coming out of our campuses, India’s innovation story is in very capable hands.
