Viksit Bharat Buildathon 2025: India’s Largest School Innovation Drive Launched

India has initiated Viksit Bharat Buildathon 2025, framed as one of its largest school-level hackathons ever, to foster creativity, innovation, and problem-solving among students. Organized by the Department of School Education & Literacy (DoSEL) under the Ministry of Education, in collaboration with Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog, and AICTE.

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Who can participate:

School students of classes 6 through 12 across the country.
Schools are to form teams (often 5-7 students) to ideate and build prototypes, under teacher mentorship.

Themes:
Participants will work on ideas and prototypes around four national themes:

Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliance)
Swadeshi (indigenous innovation)
Vocal for Local (promoting local goods/resources)
Samriddhi (prosperity and sustainable growth)

Timeline & Process:

Registration period: September 23 to October 6, 2025.
Preparation phase: October 6–13 — students work on refining ideas and prototypes with help from teachers.
Live, synchronized innovation event: October 13, 2025.
Final submissions: October 14–31. Evaluations from November through December.
Felicitation of winners: Expected in January 2026. Top ~1,000 entries will be honored.

Expected Scale & Impact:

Target participation: Over one crore students, from around 1.5 lakh to 6 lakh schools.

The initiative aims to reach aspirational, remote, and tribal areas to ensure inclusive innovation.
Apart from rewards, mentorship and opportunities for scaling prototypes are built into the programme to help promising innovations move beyond ideas.