Jalandhar lad wins Google contest

Jalandhar : A Jalandhar-based youth Prateek Narang (21) has won ‘Hackathon-2015’, an on-the-spot real time software designing competition organised online by Google on September 27 at its headquarters in Mountainview, California.The challenge ‘Code for India’ was arranged in honour of Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his recent visit to the US and was held simultaneously at the Tech Mahindra headquarters in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, to support Modi’s ‘Digital India’ campaign.Prateek, a student of Delhi College of Engineering (DCE), along with three more students, devised an application for NGO Akshay Patra which provides free food to around 1.2 million schoolchildren every day in nine states of India. Not only Google CEO Sundar Pichai but Prime Minister Narendra Modi also congratulated him over his achievement. Prateek claimed that Modi — in his congratulatory speech — has assured to use his product in the Digital India Campaign that would help the NGO in the even distribution of food to schoolchildren. “The NGO presently is facing a huge challenge due to uneven and unpredictable requirement of food. While some areas are reporting too much wastage of food, some have reported too much shortage of foodgrains.
“Our app will not only help in the even distribution of food but also predict the future requirement of a particular school by analysing its past consumption pattern.
“Also, it would help in the easy transportation of food due to its accurate requirement on a particular day,” claimed Prateek. Was he sure of winning at the outset? “Not much! We were nervous, but we took up the challenge,” said Narang.Besides winning Rs 25,000 in cash, Prateek also won many goodies from Google and a glittering trophy. Around 80 teams from the US and India participated in the instant online competition. While Indian teams won the majority of the events, even the US teams that won the rest of the prizes also had Indian students as their members.