Three hundred women from parts of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana locked horns to demonstrate their ability to convert creative ideas into applicable outcomes in the two-day first women Hackathon for smart cities that kick-started here at a hotel on Saturday.
The event, titled ‘She Builds Tech – Smart City Hackathon’, is being organised by the Girls in Tech Foundation, in association with the APSCHE, the Department of Youth Services, the Government of Andhra Pradesh, and the US Consulate General, Hyderabad, and supported by IBM and Wavelabs.
Societal bias
Inaugurating the event, Union Minister of State for Science and Technology Y. Sujana Chowdary said women continued to have an abysmal representation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) and entrepreneurship due to societal bias and lack of family support.
“In 2016, girls formed only 8% of the total admission to IITs and similar was the case in NITs. The need of the hour is to create a proper ecosystem that creates capacity-building among women and helps break stereotypes. These kinds of hackathons ignite that thought process and also provide great opportunities to women,” he said.
In India, while the number of women in STEM is increasing, the percentage of women in workforce in STEM and entrepreneurship continues to be a woefully low 12.7 %, with 40 % of female engineers remaining unemployed. GITF brings together industry experts, government officials, startup ecosystem enablers, V-Cs, entrepreneurs, organisational heads or representatives, corporate, social sector and key decision-makers from corporate to institutions as mentors for women who are graduating from colleges, women professionals, returning mothers, and women entrepreneurs.
“We envision this hackathon as a creative technological experience, where we are working to not just bring together solutions on smart city but also to equip the participants to be socially responsible and informed citizens of tomorrow so as to understand how to combine the power of education with the help of technology to solve real world problems,” said Sree Divya Vadlapudi P, Chairman of GITF.
Each team in the hackathon comprises five members who are supported by a mentor (industry expert) and corporate professionals assist them based on platform or technology chosen for the event. The teams assisted by mentors will present their work to a panel of judges on Sunday. The organisers and representatives will strive to bring the solutions as part of the hackathon to enhance efforts on building smart cities and provide possible public policy suggestions. The best solution will be awarded a platform to take the ideas further and the participants will go on to receive internship and job opportunities from companies participating in the event.
MP Avanti Srinivas, Manpreet Singh Manna, Director, AICTE, Mehnaz Ansari, USTDA Country Representative South Asia, Gabriel Olivier from the US Consulate, and other representatives from the government and private sectors were present.
