Build Open-Source Digital Public Goods for India
90 Days of Building: 15 August – 15 November 2026
Winners Announced: 5 December 2026
India has some of the world’s biggest public challenges, and technology can play a meaningful role in solving them.
This Independence Day, Code for India invites developers, designers, data scientists, students, and technologists from around the world to spend 90 days building open-source solutions for some of India’s most pressing public-health and social-impact challenges.
The idea is simple: find a real problem, build a useful solution, deploy it, and make it available for others to build upon.
How to Participate
Getting started is simple:
- Sign up on AgentFoundry.me
- Create a project in the IDE
- Invite your collaborators
- Build and deploy your solution
- Use 1 million free smart-code tokens provided for your project.
There are no pre-defined project briefs. You choose the problem you want to solve, understand its scale and impact, and decide how technology can make a difference.
Choose an Impact Area
Participants can choose from 10 impact areas and define their own problem statement within the area they select.
01 — Education
Improve learning outcomes and make education more accessible.
Focus areas: dropout prevention, vernacular-language tutoring, teacher productivity, and personalised learning.
02 — Sanitation
Use technology to improve sanitation infrastructure and community hygiene.
Focus areas: toilet access and maintenance, sewage mapping, hygiene awareness, and field reporting.
03 — Waste Management
Help communities and governments manage waste more efficiently.
Focus areas: waste segregation, collection routing, recycling markets, landfill monitoring, and plastic tracking.
04 — Clean Air
Make air-quality information more local, useful, and actionable.
Focus areas: hyper-local AQI monitoring, pollution-source identification, exposure alerts, and compliance monitoring.
05 — Clean Water
Build solutions that improve access to safe and reliable water.
Focus areas: water-quality testing, leakage detection, contamination monitoring, and groundwater intelligence.
06 — Health
Strengthen healthcare delivery and improve access to preventive and public-health services.
Focus areas: frontline health-worker support, preventive care, diagnostics access, and public-health surveillance.
07 — Timely Justice — Legal Backlog
Use technology to help make the justice system more efficient and accessible.
Focus areas: case triage, document summarisation, legal-aid access, and court scheduling.
08 — Transportation Safety
Make roads and transportation safer through technology and data.
Focus areas: accident hotspots, driver behaviour, pedestrian safety, and emergency response times.
09 — Livelihoods for the Uneducated
Create better economic opportunities for people who may not have formal education.
Focus areas: skill matching, informal-sector income opportunities, micro-entrepreneurship, and access to benefits.
10 — Tech Employment for Youth
Help young people discover opportunities and enter the technology workforce.
Focus areas: job discovery, portfolio building, apprenticeships, skill development, and hiring signals for first-time coders.
Build for 90 Days
The challenge runs from 15 August to 15 November 2026.
You have 90 days to move from an idea to a working, deployed solution.
But this isn’t about building something that looks impressive only in a demo.
Start with a real problem. Understand who is affected, how many people are affected, and how severely. Then build a solution that can actually be used.
Ask yourself:
- What problem am I solving?
- Who is affected by it?
- How large is the problem?
- What solutions already exist?
- What can technology do better?
- Can my solution work in the real world?
- Can others use, improve, or build on it?
Deploy Your Project
Judging covers every project deployed to any cloud by 15 November 2026.
Your project doesn’t have to be limited to a specific hosting provider. The important thing is that you have a working, deployed solution that demonstrates the impact of what you have built.
All projects are built using the AgentFoundry.me IDE, with 1 million free smart-code tokens available to help teams build and deploy their ideas.
From Hackathon to Public Good
Code for India was founded in Silicon Valley on 15 August 2013 and has connected more than 1,500 volunteer technologists with Indian NGOs.
In 2015, CFI organised a transcontinental hackathon during the launch of the Digital India mission.
This challenge represents the next chapter of that effort.
The goal isn’t simply to create another hackathon prototype. It is to build open-source digital public goods that can continue to create value for India long after the competition is over.
Every line of code released openly gives others the opportunity to use it, improve it, adapt it, and build something even bigger.
Build Open. Build for India.
For 90 days, developers, designers, students, researchers, and technologists from everywhere can come together around one shared goal:
Use technology to solve problems that matter.
Find a problem.
Build a solution.
Deploy it.
Make it open source.
Create something that can outlive the competition.
Awards:-
₹18 Lakh in Cash Prizes
The competition has a total prize pool of ₹18,00,000.
Winners will be announced on 5 December 2026.
🥇 1st Place
₹1,50,000
Per track / category
🥈 2nd Place
₹1,00,000
Per track / category
🥉 3rd Place
₹50,000
Per track / category
₹18,00,000 total cash prize pool
Special Sponsor Awards
In addition to the main category prizes, standout projects can also receive special recognition through sponsor awards, including:
🏆 Best Use of AgentFoundry Agents
🏆 Best xSpan CareHub Integration
Exceptional projects may also receive a fast-track opportunity to CFI’s open-source incubation program, giving promising solutions a chance to continue developing beyond the competition.
