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Tech sanitising a Digital Pune

Young minds from 70 colleges within Maharashtra and several outside the state wrestle for smart apps for fighting city's civic issues

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Pratima Harigunani
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PUNE, INDIA: A Smart Water Distribution and Leakage Detection System by Swastik Srivastava and Diwakar Shukla of Team Aqua from Army Institute of Technology was adjudged and recognised as a promising idea that could potentially solve Pune’s water and sanitation challenges at the culmination of #DigitalPune, a hackathon, conceptualised to address the city’s increasingly complex civic needs.

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Besides a prize, the winning team won incubation support from Persistent Systems to further refine the solution and make it market ready. In line with the ‘Digital India’ vision outlined by Honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ‘Co-creation’ was the watchword at the #DigitalPune Hackathon. Lasting 30 straight hours, this initiative engaged talented Computer Science under-graduates and post graduate students from 70 colleges within Maharashtra and several outside the state. It provided them an apt opportunity and platform to innovate, collaborate, code and build smart applications that could subsequently be used by government bodies for better governance, monitoring and management of various services in response to challenges witnessed in Transportation, Public Health, Education, Water and Power that currently plague the city of Pune.

#DigitalPune is a public-private partnership that saw many government and civic bodies’ team up with Persistent Systems, to explore unique and disruptive digital technology innovations for solving the challenges of Pune city.

Here government bodies including Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC), Pune Metropolitan Region Development Authority (PMRDA), Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal Limited (PMPML), Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Co. Ltd (MSEDCL) and Maharashtra Police Department, NIRT, industry body i4c and NGO Delivering Change Foundation joined hands under the aegis of this initiative.

“With India boasting a young and vibrant population, it just makes sense to get these young minds of the country charting a futuristic roadmap and build solutions to make the ‘Digital India and Smart City programmes’ a reality,” said Dr. Anand Deshpande, Founder & CEO of Persistent Systems.

With Pune being shortlisted as one of the Smart Cities under the aegis of the ‘Digital India’ vision, citizen centric sectors such as power, water & sanitation, education, public health, transportation and citizen security were identified in need of a digital overhaul.

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