AI First Product Builder Hackathon · 2026

HACKATHON to
Solve India's
Garbage Problem

Use AI to build a cleaner Bharat

150,000 tonnes of waste every day - and the systems to handle it are broken. Build AI-first products that fix what's missing. Software, hardware, or both. Open to students and adults of all experience levels.

🏁 Submission Deadline: Oct 10, 2026 · 8:00 PM IST
Sanitation worker sorting waste on an Indian street at dawn
0K
tonnes of waste generated in India - every single day
0%
of India's waste goes uncollected - ending up on streets and drains
0+
cities with open dump sites contaminating soil and groundwater
0L+
waste pickers with no formal income security or safety protection
The problem

It's not a cleanliness issue.
It's a systems failure.

Street scene with overflowing waste bins in an Indian neighbourhood
India - 150,000 tonnes of solid waste per day

Streets overflow not because nobody wants them clean - but because reporting a dirty drain leads nowhere. Kids litter not because they're careless, but because civic responsibility was never made meaningful to them.

Technology can close these gaps. That's what this hackathon asks you to build.

Whether you're a middle schooler with a simple app idea, a high schooler who wants to wire up a sensor, or a college student building a full-stack product - there's a place for your solution here.

What you can build

Six tracks. One urgent mission.

Pick one track or combine them. The best products often sit at the intersection of two.

Civic education & behaviour change
🏫Track 01
Civic education & behaviour change
Gamified apps, classroom tools, and community platforms that make civic sense stick - from school children to parents to whole neighbourhoods.
Schools · Awareness · Gamification
Street & neighbourhood action
🧹Track 02
Street & neighbourhood action
Citizen reporting tools, clean-up drive coordinators, volunteer platforms, and real-time cleanliness maps of localities.
Reporting · Maps · Community
Waste collection & segregation
🗑️Track 03
Waste collection & segregation
Smarter bins, route optimisation for garbage trucks, AI-guided at-source segregation, and household pickup scheduling apps.
IoT · Routing · Segregation
Drain & infrastructure maintenance
🌊Track 04
Drain & infrastructure maintenance
Detect, clean, and prevent drain blockages before flooding. Monitor encroached water bodies and enable community-powered infrastructure audits using computer vision.
Sensors · CV · Prevention
Recycling & circular economy
♻️Track 05
Recycling & circular economy
Connect households to kabaddi walas, identify recyclables from photos, and build platforms that make waste pickers more efficient and better paid.
Marketplace · Material ID · Livelihoods
Hardware & IoT builds
⚙️Track 06
Hardware & IoT builds
Smart dustbins, drain sensors, litter-detecting devices, solar compactors. Hardware + software combos are explicitly welcome and judged by domain experts.
Arduino · Raspberry Pi · Sensors
Not just software

You can build physical things.

Wire up an Arduino, prototype a smart bin, attach a sensor to a drain - it's all fair game. A working hardware prototype paired with an app or dashboard is a fully competitive submission in every division.

🔌
Supported hardware
Raspberry Pi, Arduino, ESP32, NodeMCU - any microcontroller or sensor setup works
🎥
Two videos required
A project demo showing the hardware working end-to-end, plus a code & stack walkthrough.
📁
Code + circuit diagram
Push your firmware/software code to a public GitHub repo with a README explaining the setup.
⚖️
Expert judges
Judges include domain experts who understand hardware constraints and tradeoffs
Fair for everyone

One event. Three divisions.

You're judged among your peers. A middle schooler is never compared to a college student.

Middle school students
Middle School
Creativity & clarity win.
Grades 6–8. Judges look for a clear understanding of the problem and a working concept - not deep technical implementation. A classroom game or hardware prototype is perfectly competitive.
High school students building
High School
A real product with a real flow.
Grades 9–12. A functional product a real user could try. Technical depth matters. Hardware + software combinations are strongly encouraged.
College students collaborating
College & Grads
End-to-end. Real data. Ship it.
Current students or any college graduate. Complete product with working AI, real data, and a credible deployment plan.
Registration is open · Free

Build something
India needs.

Register on College.dev, start building from Jul 20, 2026. Submit by Oct 10, 2026 · 8:00 PM IST.