Ministry of Education’s innovation cell, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D) have jointly launched the MANTHAN 2021 hackathon, a unique national initiative to identify innovative concepts and technology solutions for addressing the security challenges of the 21st century faced by the intelligence agencies.

MANTHAN 2021 official website

MANTHAN 2021 will have two phases. In the first phase, participants would submit their concepts against the problem statements which they wish to solve on the portal. These submitted ideas will be evaluated by group of experts in the field and only the innovative ideas will be selected for the Grand Finale or 2nd round scheduled from 28 November 2021. During the grand finale, selected participants are expected to build the solution to demonstrate their concepts and prove to the juries that their ideas are technically feasible and more importantly implementable. Best ideas will be declared winners.

The various problem statements are image and video analytics, sentiment analysis, natural language processing, image and video analytics, data analytics, fake content detection and cybercrime.

For College/University students, all team members should be from same college; no inter-college teams are allowed. However, members from different branches of the same college/ institute are encouraged to form a team.

During the launch program, Neeraj Sinha, Additional Director General, BPRD said that for MANTHAN 2021, BPRD has released 20 challenge statements which offer unique opportunity to all our youngsters to think out-of-the-box and develop innovative concepts for solving some of the daunting problems faced by our security agencies. If we like some ideas, then we will work very closely with those teams and support their implementation, he added.

“From last 5 years, we have organised many national and international Hackathons by collaborating with different agencies as we are keen on offering real life challenges or problems for students to work. We want them to solve problems which are critical for our country and from that perspective we believe that this MANTHAN Hackathon is very crucial as it has direct application in strengthening our national security, he added. He hoped that a large number of youngsters will participate in this initiative and will help BPR&D to identify best of the minds and ideas from our country,” Anil D. Sahasrabudhe, Chairman, AICTE said during the launch event.