Close to 500 years ago, Bengaluru founder Kempe Gowda I envisioned his city to be a vibrant melting pot for people from all kinds of professions and cultures. He started with four main streets North-South and East-West - starting with Doddapette (now Avenue Road) and Chikkapete and created more such as Aralepete (Cottonpet), Akkipete, Ragipete, Balepete for trading goods like cotton, rice, fox millet and bangles. He also built several tanks and ponds across the city to meet the growing need for water.
Bengaluru has now grown into a megacity of global repute. Over the years, Karnataka's capital city has earned several names, including Silicon Valley of India, Start-up City, Garden City and Pensioners’ Paradise.
The city's growth, however, has been haphazard. Most of the lakes have been encroached by greedy realtors and others are fed with sewage waters. Also, infrastructure development has been awfully slow for a city with a population of more than 1.3 crore.
There's a very real threat that Bengaluru could become uninhabitable in the near future. That means there's an urgent need for the government to make course corrections in city development.
As part of the DH Bengaluru 2040 Summit, Deccan Herald joined technology partner Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India (MBRDI) to host Hack-Star, a hackathon that invited young citizens to come up with smart and sustainable ideas to improve the quality of life in the city.
An all-girl team named Garud from the KIET Group Of Institutions, Ghaziabad, UP, won the top prize of Rs 2 lakh along with pre-placement offers to work with MBRDI. The team members were Amisha Sharma, Ayushi Tyagi, Vanshika Namdev and Meetika Jain.
Due to illegal parking on footpaths in cities, many people are forced to walk on roads, which causes pedestrian accidents and many deaths. Garud developed an app with a machine learning capability that will detect vehicles parked on footpaths and report the information to the traffic authorities.
Team Garud also has ideas to evolve the app with new features so that users can send the illegal parking locations to a online automated portal so as to enable prompt action.
The second prize of Rs 1.5 lakh with pre-placement work offers went to Team Hack_EVStations, which was made up of Rithik Raj Pandey, Sarthak Khandelwal and Anukalp Jain from Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering, Karnataka.
The third prize of Rs 1 lakh with pre-placement work offers was given to Team EvTech with Anurag Vaibhav, Nikhil Agarwal, Suraj Gorai, and Pranjal Paira as members. They are from IIT Kharagpur, West Bengal.
Also, a consolation prize was given to Team Sarathi with Ayush Rungta, Tejas Shah, Sonal Sengupta, and Saraswat Ghosh from the Dayananda Sagar Academy of Technology and Management, Karnataka.
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