Code for India is an initiative to bring along developers across the globe to code for the social challenges faced by India. A recent notable app that was made possible by this initiative was “I Vote for A Better India”.
The app had such widespread impact on youth that even the election commission had to agree to use it. The other projects by Code for India are Spotter, Saferoute, Indian Music Archive, Ubuntu at Work etc.
Code for India has partnered with Morpheus, Akshay Patra, Haiyya, Pratham, Swaniti, Ubuntu at Work, Archive of Indian Music, Parishudh, Center of South Asia at Stanford, Overseas Volunteer for a Better India, The World Bank and The Indus Entrepreneurs chapters in Silicon Valley, Mumbai and New Delhi..
Code for India is organizing their second hackathon this year on simultaneously held in the US and India. The event is scheduled to start on May 10th , 2014 at Google Campus (Bangalore) and May 9, 2014 at Google Campus in Mountain View, California.
The keynote speakers include Infosys founder Narayana Murthy and Google India senior VP Amit Singhal. The judges panel have Karl Mehta, Phanindra Sama (Founder of Redbus), Pranav Tiwari (Head of Engineering, Google India) and Asha Jadeja Motwani (VC).
The sponsors for the hackathon are Code for Resilience, World Bank Group Finances, Google, CISCO, Amazon, Intel Software, Wipro and Oracle. The prizes are Nexus 5 (32 GB), Moto X (16GB) (India), HP Chromebook 11 (USA, Nexus 7 (32 GB), Moto G (16 GB) which are sponsored by Google Play.
Karl Mehta, the Silicon Valley millionaire is the man on a mission to change India’s socio-political issues with technology. Founder of PlaySpin(sold to Visa in 2011 for $240 million) and currently a venture capitalist for Menlo Ventures, Mehta didn’t want to form another NGO in a quest to help India, instead, he helped build a platform to help developers from around the world to aid in the efforts of other NGOs by coding for them.
