Akhouri Piyush Raj, Saurabh Vats, Shekhar Kumar and Ankur Kumar Agarwal of MIT, Manipal, bagged the first spot for presenting a renewable energy-based fish processing plant , earning a  cash prize of Rs 50,000.

The theme for this year’s edition is ‘Energy Efficiency’ and the idea behind this contest is to make students think ‘out of the box’ and come up with innovative solutions towards the different issues related to the energy and automation sectors, and develop the budding engineering talent across the country.

The second spot was bagged by students of IIT-Guwahati who presented a Rumble Strip Dynamometer. 47 engineering colleges across India, participated in the contest and 12 teams with four members each qualified to the finals.

This year’s finalists were RVCE Bangalore, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Guwahati, IIT Kanpur, VJTI Mumbai, MIT Manipal, SJCE Mysore, NITK Surathkal, NIT Rourkela and MIT Anna University.

The contest was open for under-graduates of all engineering streams and an elite panel of professors, from premier engineering colleges, were present to assess the presentations.

During the completion each team was allotted 20 minutes to present and another five minutes for questions and answers.

The ideas were judged on counts of innovation, practical application of the solution, backing the solution with facts, attention to details.