This is going to be my first article, so an error might crop up but the one thing I can ensure is that after reading this article you will be able to get a valuable insight, descriptive idea along with the dos and don'ts of the journey of Smart India Hackathon.

Instead of a traditional way of sharing about the hackathon, I am going to narrate everything through my own journey.

So, now let's dive into this beautiful journey,

The topics covered throughout the article is
1. Seeding about SIH
2. Building the Team
3. How to choose a problem statement
4. Crafting Idea against the problem statement
5. Excitement after selection of the idea
6. Implementation
7. Grand Finale
day-1
i. 1st round
ii. 2nd round
Day-2
ii. 3rd round
iv. 4th round
v. Final result
Dinner
8. Conclusion

So now, let's get straight to the point.
The story I am going to share, involves 6 main characters:
Kunal Paul
Biraj Mahanta

Simardeep Kaur Arora

Deepraj Das

Satyam Kumar and

Nabarun Paul
All the names(characters) are kept serially, you can recognise it by seeing clockwise arrangement in the above cover image.

Seeding
In the initial days of my college, I used to watch a lot of Ted Talks and podcasts.
And the entire concept of the Smart India Hackathon was planted in my mind after I watched a podcast featuring Akash Chaudhary who was a former participant of Smart India Hackathon, where he narrated his journey of Hackathon, after watching that podcast, I started to research about the SIH and then internally prepared myself to participate in the SIH.

Team
Then I shared everything with one of my very close friend named Nabarun, and after a big round of questionnaires and discussion, he was also convinced to participate in SIH.

Then, we approached a faculty member of our dept. for college SPOC(Single Point of Contact) and Internal Hackathon, and we somehow convinced him to conduct the Internal Hackathon.

But the problem arose when we told him that we have only two weeks to submit the internal hackathon details and our END TERM examination about to start, then he completely denied and suggested to participate next year and then every plan went into hell.

After time passes, we get a message from our college group that the date of SIH is now extended and at that time we don't have any academic pressure because our END Term examinations have just ended.
And everyone started to build their team.

Later on, we met with Deepraj, Kunal, Biraj & Simar who were also trying to build the team for SIH. So that's where our team formation part was completed.

NOTE: While building your team, make in mind that at least 3-4 team members have the tech skills because during the implementation, a lot of error arises that's where you need a person with whom you can share your specific bugs and together you can resolve that issue.
Moreover, when you are building a large product then you have to divide into different sections and stages among your teammates, and each one should be assigned a different task so that you can build the prototype as soon as possible.

How to choose a problem statement:
Every edition of SIH shared a wide range of problems of the industry and various ministries of India. It ranges between 3-5 hundred total problem statements.

In the 1st sight we are even unable to understand the problem statements which are listed on the SIH portal so we assigned every team member to at least select 3 problem statements that you can make everyone understand in a simple way that what the actual problem is. So, in total we understood 18(3*6) problem statements.
After various online meets we shortlisted almost 6-7 problem statements by taking into consideration, different aspects like technical feasibility and our technical skills.

Crafting Idea against the problem statement

After shortlisting the problem statement we assigned ourselves one problem statement each person and directed to do a depth research about the problem statement and their idea(basically how we can solve that problem).
And everyone was given a fixed span of time to craft an idea against their assigned problem.

Then, we again conducted a meet where everyone presented their idea against their assigned problem, in front of everyone.
And everyone was asked to give a point either 0 or 1 against the everyone's idea where Nabarun's idea got the maximum points, then everyone decided to go with that.

The problem statement was: To automate the process of manual verification of scholarship user credentials.
Basically, it'll take almost 6 months to verify the scholarship user credentials and we had to perform this task in real-time.

The core concept of our idea was to verify the different documents(like aadhaar, qualification, bonafide, income residence etc) and information provided by scholarship users automatically.
So we started doing research about, how the manual verification of documents take place in the different educational institutions.

During this period we had also talked to the current admission in charge at that time of our college(Dr. Pranab Kumar Sarkar), we had talked for almost 35 minutes with him.
In that talk he shared some key insight from an administrative perspective about the students' document and information verification process. He had also shared the information like, we only store the B.Tech students' information only for 4-5 years in the database after this time span we generally delete it due to high cost of cloud storage, this question raised by us because we wanted to verify the students' information by contacting the AICTE to provide us the access of some information from the university/college database and it could be possible by adding an api end point in the university server. And that will actually remove the extra verification like bonafide qualifications etc.

After considering the each minute and big aspects we finally designed a flowchart of our idea and prepared the presentation and submitted on the SIH portal.

Excitement after selection of the idea
That was actually the summer vacation and the whole Silchar was sunke into the water due to flood. So, entire communication and transportation system was disrupted. That's why we were unable to check the any online result or status about anything.

On the 23rd of June 2022 I got a call from Deepraj in a low network situation and our communication also started to fluctuate but somehow I was able to hear that line "Our team has selected for the SIH-2022". And after this moment, I shouted up so loudly in my room, and the other hostel mates came and asked what happened then I shared everything, to be honest that feelings can't be shared in the words, we didn't expect even for the selection in SIH and our team was firstly selected for the SIH Grand Finale from our college.

After some time we received our college SPOC message in the community,
I'm quoting his exact line here:
"Congratulations our one team have been selected for final so far"
Which one team sir?
"Simardeep Kaur's team
Hope other team also get nominated"

So at this point of time the whole team member's energy was high and everyone was so motivated for the grand finale.

Implementation
In implementation, firstly we analysed the different domains that would be going to be used in the project and then each member was asked to learn the assigned technology and it was actually assigned based upon their talent/expertise in that specific domain.

Initially Kunal and Biraj were taken the responsibility of frontend and database part(React Js and Mongodb)
Nabarun and I were taken the responsibility of Backend(Node Js)
And, Deepraj & Simar were assigned the image processing because we wanted to detect the text from the uploaded document by users for verification.

Mind mapping during the technology domain division:
Since it was a FULL STACK project so there should be a person that could be able to integrate the whole project that is frontend and backend together for the final prototype. This is where Kunal and I took the responsibility of this part because I had already completed my frontend (React Js) during COLLEGE BOOK creation.
And, backend(Node Js), I had learned and Kunal had gained the database(Mongodb) knowledge during the gap and then together we formed a FULL STACK developer.

When we had only 7-10 days left for the grand finale then we decided to work together at one place so Deepraj suggested their home to work together and that was actually the cool and calm place and it was in the centre of all the other teammates residences. And we started working together from 3pm to 9pm everyday there.
I still remember the taste of Deepraj ki maa k haath ka khana!

Now back to the original point,
Initially Biraj along with Kunal designed the basic frontend and then I started integrating the backend with the frontend to make it dynamic and functional.

We had almost 4 days left to visit the Grand Finale center, in our case it was PARUL UNIVERSITY, VADODARA GUJRAT.