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IIT Kharagpur students secured the first position at a competition held at IIM Ahmedabad on 9th January. Team 'Aces' comprising of four 4th year undergraduate students, Anubhav Goyal, Anush Gupta, Lakshya Kalra and Shreshtha Mundra won the PAN India HULT Prize competition. They competed against another 30 teams from all over India and pitched their ideas in front of a panel of 13 known judges.
They now will be participating in the Regional Finals of HULT Prize Competition 2016 being held at Boston, for a prize money of $1 million. They will be standing against 50 other teams from across the globe this time. The other finalists include teams from other prestigious colleges and universities like Harvard, MIT, and Yale.
In the competition, the teams were asked to suggest ideas to double the income of people living in crowded urban areas within 5 years. The winning team 'Aces' had come up with a mobile application along the lines of Mechanical Turk which utilises the free time of the people create a means of stable income for the people in the slums. The app basically has simple questions based on image categorization and text verification. The team will provide this data to research groups and companies that require this preliminary data processing and transfer the monetary benefits to the people in crowded slums. The panel liked the idea and taking it further, they are planning to implement the same. A pilot ( trial) of the same will be conducted in the month of February and the results of the same will be used at the competition in Boston. The development of the mobile app is in the beta stage and is being handled by one of our team members.
The University showed true entrepreneurial skills as 5 of the 30 teams at IIM Ahmedabad and 2 of the top 3 teams were from IIT Kharagpur. Team Sanyojan comprising of Ayush Garg, Kartik Pal, Pradeep Kumar Mittapally and Pradyumna Mishra bagged the 3rd prize and will be competing at the Shanghai Regional Finals.
The HULT Prize is organized by HULT International Business School in partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative and is largest student competition globally to solve the world's toughest social challenges. The Hult Prize Foundation is a start-up accelerator for budding young social entrepreneurs emerging from the world's universities. Named as one of the top five ideas changing the world by Former US President Bill Clinton and TIME Magazine, the annual competition for the Hult Prize aims to create and launch the most compelling social business ideas to solve big problems faced by billions of people.
