Kharagpur, Jul 9 (IANS): Fourteen teams from seven states are participating in the week-long hardware edition of Smart India Hackathon 2019 that started at the IIT here on Monday.

Assam, Delhi, Haryana, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Telegana and West Bengal are taking part in the pan-India competition.

"This is not only the world's largest innovation competition, but it is also currently in its third successful year of implementation. Student participation is increasing with each passing year indicating that the students are no longer limited to class," said Union Human Resource Development Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal 'Nishank', who inaugurated the event across 18 nodal centres in nine states, one union territory and NCR through video conferencing.

Explaining the concept of Hackathon, Prof. P P Chakrabarti of IIT Kharagpur who has been mentoring this event addressed it as a new education methodology.

"The paradigm of engineering education is transforming in such a way that there are newer methods of learning and gradually becoming part of the core curriculum. Hackathon enables multiple aspects - first is the doing aspect of core engineering, second is bringing focus on economics, humanities and social sciences along with technical aspect and creative idea generation, this forming a convergence," he pointed out.

At IIT Kharagpur, 93 students will work towards solving challenges for smart vehicles, smart communication, security and surveillance and miscellaneous. The students are expected to bring out technology-based, easy, workable solutions through "out-of-the-box-thinking", which will lead to commercial products to develop start-ups.

"There are many areas where the country is looking for viable solutions and I am really happy to see a large number of young talents are coming forward to take up those challenges, to think differently as to how solutions to these problems can be given; and that's what is very important," said Prof. S K Bhattacharyya, Director (Officiating) of IIT Kharagpur.