India Innovates 2026

India’s Biggest Tech Innovation Summit — Where Code Meets Constitution
Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi | 28–29 March 2026
India Innovates 2026 is inviting India’s brightest student innovators to bring working products, prototypes, and breakthrough ideas that can transform governance, security, and national systems.
This is not just a competition — this is your chance to showcase at a national stage where policy meets innovation, in front of investors, government leaders, bureaucrats, diplomats, founders, and ecosystem builders.

3 Innovation Themes (Domains):

Data Mining and Processing:

• Build solutions that strengthen democracy, governance, citizen services, and political systems.

Problem Statements (Choose any):

• Design and develop an AI-powered Global Ontology Engine that can collect and understand structured data, unstructured content, and live real-time feeds from areas like geopolitics, economics, defense, technology, climate, and society—and then connect all of it into a single, unified, constantly updating intelligence graph, so decision-makers can get clear insights for strategy, transparency, and national advantage for India and the world.
• Problem Statement: Develop an AI-Driven Booth Management System that transforms static voter lists into a living "Knowledge Graph." The system must enable hyper-local targeting by categorizing every voter at a booth level and delivering personalized governance updates directly to their devices.

Key Objectives:

• Intelligent Segmentation: Automatically classify booth data into segments like Youth, Businessmen, Farmers, and Women to identify "Key Voters."
• Hyper-Local Content Delivery: A precision engine to send tailored information (e.g., startup schemes for youth, subsidies for farmers) via automated, personalized channels.
• Micro-Accountability Mapping: If a specific street (Gali) gets a new road or streetlight, the system must trigger a notification with "Before & After" proof only to the residents of that specific street.
• Beneficiary Linkage: Track and map government scheme beneficiaries (e.g., Ayushman Bharat) within the booth to strengthen the leader-citizen bond.
• Political parties often struggle to manage thousands of ground-level workers and volunteers due to poor coordination, unclear task allocation, weak reporting, and lack of real-time visibility. The challenge is to build a Party Worker Management System that digitally organizes worker profiles, assigns area-wise responsibilities, tracks daily activities and outreach, monitors performance through dashboards, enables fast communication, and ensures smooth execution of campaigns, events, and voter engagement at scale.
• Public sentiment shifts quickly across social media, news, surveys, and ground feedback, but political teams often lack a system to track it in real time at both mass public level and booth-level micro areas. The challenge is to build an AI-driven Sentiment Analysis Engine that analyzes multi-language data, detects positive/negative/neutral sentiment, identifies key issues and trends, and provides booth-wise + constituency-wise dashboards, heatmaps, and alerts to support faster decision-making and targeted outreach.

Open Innovation Category:

• Any system that enables smart decision-making using data pipelines, mining, analytics, and AI intelligence graphs.

Cyber Security:

• Build systems that protect institutions, political organizations, and critical digital infrastructure.

Problem Statements:

• Cyber Security System: threat detection, secure access, encryption, phishing prevention & incident response

Open Innovation Category:

• Any solution that strengthens digital trust, identity security, cyber resilience, or fraud prevention.

Politics & Civic Tech:

• Convert fragmented information into actionable intelligence at scale.

Problem Statements (Choose any):

• Design and build an AI-powered Avatar Platform that enables individuals, leaders, educators, and organizations to create realistic, interactive digital avatars capable of speaking, presenting, and engaging with audiences in real time across multiple languages—delivering personalized communication, scalable outreach, and high-impact digital presence for governance, education, customer engagement, and public awareness at scale.
• Design and build an AI-powered Inbound and Outbound Calling Agent that can manage high-volume phone conversations in multiple Indian and global languages for political war rooms, call centers, customer support, surveys, lead generation, grievance redressal, and outreach campaigns—with the ability to understand natural speech, respond intelligently in real time, maintain context, log outcomes, escalate complex cases to human agents, and generate actionable insights, enabling faster, smarter, and more inclusive communication at scale.
• Build a *Hyper-Local Targeting Engine* that creates a digital *geo-fence* around public development locations—such as *government hospitals, colleges, bridges, and other infrastructure projects. Whenever a citizen/voter enters this geo-fenced area, the system should instantly trigger a **location-based, context-aware advertisement* or a *personalized notification* explaining the specific work done at that site and the leader’s contribution, in a clear and credible way.
• Political offices often struggle with manual paperwork, scattered citizen complaints, and poor follow-up tracking, which leads to delays and unresolved issues. The challenge is to build a Smart Political CRM (P-CRM)—a digital command center that organizes all constituent requests in one place, automates office workflows, assigns tasks to the right team members, tracks progress in real time, and ensures every citizen’s grievance is resolved quickly, transparently, and efficiently.
• Traditional voting systems can face challenges like long queues, slow counting, logistical costs, and concerns around transparency and trust. The challenge is to build a secure, scalable E-Voting System that enables eligible voters to cast their vote digitally with strong identity verification, end-to-end encryption, tamper-proof audit trails, and real-time monitoring, ensuring elections remain fair, transparent, accessible, and trustworthy at scale.
• Politicians handle massive workloads like public grievances, meetings, speeches, media responses, constituency data, and policy decisions, often without a unified system for real-time support. The challenge is to develop an AI Co-Pilot for Politicians combining hardware and software—a secure, always-available assistant that can summarize files and meetings, draft speeches and replies, track constituency issues, provide real-time insights, manage schedules, and support faster decision-making through a privacy-first, reliable, and scalable intelligence platform.
• Public townhalls are often limited by venue capacity, security concerns, travel constraints, and low participation. The challenge is to build a VR Townhall Platform that enables citizens to join a virtual reality public meeting from anywhere, interact with leaders in real time through Q&A, polls, and discussions, and experience an immersive, inclusive, and scalable way of civic engagement—while ensuring identity verification, moderation, accessibility, and data security.
• Political leaders and organizations need to manage multiple social media platforms, but face challenges like high content demand, slow response times, inconsistent messaging, and difficulty tracking performance. The challenge is to build an AI-powered Social Media Management System that can plan, generate, schedule, and publish content, monitor comments and DMs, suggest real-time replies, track trends and sentiment, and provide analytics dashboards—ensuring faster communication, stronger public engagement, and a consistent digital brand across platforms.

Open Innovation Category:

• Any innovation that improves governance, transparency, citizen participation, or civic delivery.

Program Structure (Selection + Exhibition + On-Spot Judging):

Step 1: Register on Unstop:

• All teams must submit their application on Unstop.
• Registrations will be evaluated and shortlisted first.

Step 2: Top 300 Teams Get Exhibition Booth Space:

The Top 300 teams will be selected beforehand, based on their Unstop application.
Selected teams will receive an Exhibition Booth Space to present their innovation to:

Investors:

• Government & Ministries
• Bureaucrats & Diplomats
• Startup founders & ecosystem leaders

Step 3: Live Showcase at Bharat Mandapam:

• Shortlisted teams will be invited to the venue to showcase their product/prototype live.

Exhibition Timings (Both Days):

• 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM
• Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi

Step 4: On-the-Spot Evaluation:

Judges will evaluate the innovations on-ground, in real time, based on:

• Product clarity & impact
• Innovation & scalability
• Feasibility and execution
• Relevance to the domain

Step 5: Winners Announced (Top 3 per Domain):

• The Top 3 teams in each domain will win prizes as per the structure below.

Rewards & Outcomes:

• ️Government + Political Party Pitch Opportunity:
• Top innovations will get an opportunity where we will pitch their ideas to the government and political parties for real-world implementation.

Total Cash Pool: ₹10,00,000 (Overall)

Prizes in each domain (3 Domains):

• 1st Prize: ₹1,50,000
• 2nd Prize: ₹1,00,000
• 3rd Prize: ₹50,000
• Runner-Up: ₹35,000

Paid Government Apprenticeship + Full-Time Opportunity:

• The best ideas will also receive a paid apprenticeship with the government, with a chance to convert into a full-time role based on performance and requirements.

Cultural Night Access:

• All shortlisted participants showcasing at the venue will also be invited to the Cultural Night after the exhibition hours.

Why You Should Participate:

• India Innovates 2026 is a high-credibility national platform bringing together power, policy, capital, and innovation under one roof.
• This is where student innovations can move from college-level projects → national-level implementation.

Quick Info:

• Venue: Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi
• Dates: 28–29 March 2026
• Expo Timings: 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM (Both Days)
• Domains: Politics & Civic Tech | Cyber Security | Data Mining & Processing

Key Points:

• Teams must select one problem statement from any one domain ONLY.
• All development must be completed before the Finale.
• No development or coding time will be provided on the Final Presentation Day.

Rules:

• Projects must be original and developed specifically for India Innovates 2026,
  • Previously submitted, published, or commercially deployed projects should be avoided.
  • Open-source tools and datasets may be used.
• Plagiarism will result in disqualification.
  • Professional conduct is mandatory.
• Jury decisions are final.
• Organizers reserve the right to alter rules in exceptional circumstances with due notice.

Additional Information:

• Travel and accommodation for the finale are the responsibility of participants.
• Participation certificates will be provided to teams that successfully complete Round 1.
• Join the Official WhatsApp Community: https://chat.whatsapp.com/DOs79yuKXAB4jm76wNJsNc