At Capgemini’s tech hackathon, 55 finalists compete to solve India's water crisis

Environmental concerns are dominating the mainstream discourse. A WaterAid report ranks India a lowly 120 among 122 countries on the Water Quality Index. The reason? Reckless exploitation of groundwater has contaminated this preresource. The good news, however, is that technology can play a role in providing opportunities to ensure environmental sustainability.

Capgemini in India has set the pace with Tech Challenge, its flagship tech hackathon. Tech Challenge 2019 was its sixth edition and was hosted at its Hinjewadi campus in Pune recently. The event received a record 1,60,000 registrations from over 80 cities in India. Participants had to solve a coding task over three months, and the top 55 qualified for the finals.

There was a healthy mix of students, as well as young and senior professionals, among the finalists, with 30 per cent of the final contenders being women. The finalists, who came from backgrounds in cybersecurity, DCX, I&D and Cloud, were split into 10 teams and tasked to address the final challenge. The ‘finale tech challenge’ was to create a proof of concept for efficient water management and conservation, which aligns with Capgemini’s focus on sustainability.


Team TechELITES won the Tech Challenge 2019 title for developing an app for effective water conservation. The solution deploys AZURE and AWS services and is built using new-age digital technologies like Cloud, IoT, AI and Analytics to overcome water leakage, track consumption and enable water treatment across domestic, commercial and industrial usage.

Arul Kumaran Paramanandam, COO-India, Capgemini, said, “Tech Challenge has become a unique platform to engage young and brilliant minds in the industry to successfully find solutions to real-life social challenges using emerging technologies. The record response this year and the quality of talent reflects our conviction that millennials have the power to be the Architects of Positive Futures and revolutionalise the way we interact with society and the world at large.”

Sarika Naik, CMO-India, Capgemini, said, “The idea behind Tech Challenge is to stimulate ideation, creativity and innovation and bring the best IT talent in India together. It fits in perfectly with Capgemini’s basic values, including boldness, team spirit, trust, and free-dom. We want participants at Tech Challenge to carry their ability to innovate and drive agility in the way they think, work and find solutions to real-world issues.”