Recently, I had the privilege of serving as a judge at “Netweb’s Ideatron: AI for Public Good” hackathon an inspiring event focused on leveraging Artificial Intelligence to solve real-world societal challenges.

The hackathon was organized as a pre-summit initiative leading up to the AI Impact Summit 2026, bringing together innovators, mentors, and policymakers around the shared goal of using AI for meaningful public impact.

Here are a few key takeaways from this remarkable experience.

👏 A Remarkable Effort by Netweb and Reskill

Organized by Netweb Technologies India Ltd in collaboration with Reskill, the hackathon represented an enormous operational and intellectual effort — from shortlisting thousands of applicants to mentoring teams and managing a high-energy, high-quality final showcase.

The teams presenting were already winners in their own right, having gone through multiple rigorous selection rounds. Our role as judges was truly about choosing the best among the best.

What stood out most was how thoughtfully the problem statements were aligned with India’s most pressing challenges across healthcare, education, agriculture, climate change, and governance — and mapped directly to key institutions such as NITI Aayog, the Ministry of Health, Education, Agriculture, Environment, and MeitY.

This strong linkage ensures that winning ideas don’t remain just concepts — they have a real pathway toward incubation, policy support, and implementation at scale.

🚀 Powerful AI Ideas Addressing Real Problems

The diversity and practicality of solutions were truly impressive, including:

• AI-powered healthcare diagnostics for rural communities
• Transparent mandi price aggregation for agriculture supply chains
• AI-driven crop disease detection and advisory systems
• Personal AI assistants for farmers
• IoT-based soil and crop monitoring
• Smart traffic management using AI
• Air quality monitoring and prediction platforms
• Bird behavior analysis for weather forecasting

…and many more — backed by some excellent working demos.

It was inspiring to see young innovators combining technology with purpose.

📚 Awards, Gratitude, and Lasting Memories

Along with exciting prizes from the organizers, I had promised to gift signed copies of my recent book Jagjeevan: Living Larger Than Life to the winning teams — which I was delighted to do.

I also shared signed copies with a few fellow jury members and members of the Netweb team as a small token of appreciation.

Lovely meeting Srishti Gupta, Swastik Chakraborty, Akshat Agrawal, Nilanjan Ghatak, Puneet Jain, and Rajesh Panchal

Thanks Rohit Sardana, Azkar Khan, from Reskill for the opportunity, who are doing amazing work in building communities around AI and emerging technologies.

Wishing everyone continued success — and Jagjeevan to all!