Bhopal Smart City Development Corporation enters into partnership with HackerEarth for smart city mission

HackerEarth has been chosen by the Bhopal Smart City Development Corporation Ltd (BSCDCL) to host a 48 hours hackathon under its smart city mission. The BSCDCL is working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), which is providing tools and platform-support to participating developers. The offline event, to be held in Bhopal on April 21 & 22, will enable participants to create technological solutions which will help authorities create the city of the future.

Bhopal is the capital of Madhya Pradesh and is one of the 100 cities chosen for development as a smart city. HPE and BSCDCL are currently monitoring the city’s civic utilities and planning for services that can be deployed in a number of use-cases, from smart energy-efficient traffic lights to tracking waste bin collection.

The BSCDCL, in partnership with HPE, has also announced the launch of their first incubation centre that will champion the cause of entrepreneurship in Bhopal, providing local startups with a fully-equipped co-working space along with technological, legal, marketing, and financial services at their service. The incubation centre is India's first cloud-based system that enables monitoring and administration of multiple city civic utilities and citizen services in multiple cities through a central cloud. Winning hacks will be incubated in this centre for a minimum period of 6 months after the hackathon.

HackerEarth has a proven track record of conducting more than 1,000 internal and open innovation campaigns on their platform, Sprint. Sprint is currently being used by 500 customers including MNCs, banks, IT companies and e-commerce companies. HackerEarth also allows customers to leverage their ever-expanding developer community of 1.6 million.

The hackathon is looking for solutions across the following themes:

● Healthcare: IoT is changing the way India’s healthcare system works. A unified healthcare system, with collecting and sharing of data along with analysis and research practices, is what will determine the future of urban healthcare.

● Water: Solutions are to be developed for more efficient plant operations, optimization of pumping, asset management, power usage optimization, leak detection, detection of contaminants, and consumer access to individual usage.

● Agriculture: Sustainable food production is an urgent task, considering climate change and pressure on natural resources. Technology can revolutionise the agriculture sector; many new ideas are cropping up to make farming more efficient using AI, machine learning, IoT etc.

● Transport: Solutions are sought to manage city traffic more efficiently.

● Waste management: With the increasing population of cities, it has become critical to identify new ways to manage waste

● Energy: Energy is going to be one of the biggest game-changing industries in the near future. Solutions are required to redefine urban energy by creating solutions that provide cleaner and leaner energy in tomorrow's cities.

● Industrial IoT: Industrial Internet of Things is a rapidly progressing sector, accounting for the maximum share in the global IoT spending. The solutions should enable digital factory automation, connected facility management, more efficient monitoring of production flow and inventory, and an overall boost to tomorrow's industrial quality and optimization.

● Citizen Services: With mass urbanization, people face an ever-increasing demand for better services and quality of life. Technology can create a city where citizens have on-demand, multi-channel access to public information and services they expect.

● City Surveillance: Apart from monitoring, CCTVs today have the capability to store large amounts of data, predict high traffic routes, integrate with multiple devices, and provide real time data about the city.

● Fintech: Solutions are sought to connect the city to the fast paced financial services sector which can enhance the living experience of citizens multifold.

The first phase of the hackathon started on March 21, 2018 where participants will register and send in their ideas. The shortlisted ideas will be chosen and selected teams will be invited to participate at the offline event to be held on April 21 & 22 at Noor-Us-Sabah Palace, Bhopal. The winners of the hackathon will be awarded Rs.1,75,000 and a chance to be incubated.