Featured competition · National · Vendor-neutral
The Great IndianFDE Hackathon 2026
Ship the agent that cleans up a 43-year-old manufacturer — and prove it by the business outcomes it delivers. Four task families, one shared environment, and a hidden key that decides the score. Download the data, build in whatever environment you already use, and upload the output file for automatic scoring.
- Entrants
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- Submissions today
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- Hours to next deadline
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- Host
- AIM Media House
Opens 20 Aug 2026 · Closes 27 Sep 2026, 23:59 IST · Stage at Cypher 2026
Competition rules
Read these before you submit. Everything here is enforced server-side.
Eligibility
Open to engineers based in India. Students, working professionals, and independent builders all qualify. AIM Media House staff and contributors to the evaluation key are excluded.
Participation
This is an individual contest. One account per person, one entry per account, enforced server-side. Teams are not permitted; every submission is scored against the account that uploaded it.
Students
Mark yourself as a student on your dashboard and name your institution. Students are badged on the leaderboard and ranked in a separate student category as well as overall.
The datapack
Every participant works from the same public extract of DRI's systems: ERP masters, purchase orders, vendor invoices, tickets, the ops@ mailbox, the knowledge questions, and four policy documents. No account is required to download it.
Submission format
A single CSV per task family. Reconciliation: invoice_number,status. Knowledge: qid,answer,governing_source. Headers are required. Files that do not parse, are missing columns, or omit rows are rejected — a rejection does not consume an attempt.
Attempt limits
Five scored runs per task family per day, where a day is a calendar day in Asia/Kolkata. Limits are enforced server-side and cannot be reset by re-registering.
Reconciliation scoring
Score is the macro-averaged F1 across the eight status classes, so rare classes count as much as common ones. Answering everything with the majority class scores poorly by design.
Knowledge scoring
Score is the mean over questions. Each question is worth 0.5 for the correct answer and 0.5 for citing the governing source document. Where the 2019 and 2023 policies conflict, the governing source is the one that actually applies on the transaction date.
Feedback policy
You receive one number per submission. No per-row correctness, no per-class breakdown, no error listings. The ground truth is never exposed to any client.
Workflow and migration
The workflow and migration sandboxes open later in the event. Their weights are already published so you can plan: reconciliation 0.3, knowledge 0.2, workflow 0.3, migration 0.2. The composite score normalises across whichever families are live.
Integrity
No probing of the scoring endpoints, no attempts to obtain the hidden key, no sharing of submission files between participants, no multiple accounts to farm attempts. Organisers may disqualify a participant; disqualified participants disappear from the leaderboard and cannot submit.
Freeze and finals
All submissions freeze at 23:59 IST on Sep 27, 2026. Finalists present a live walkthrough at Cypher 2026, and winners are announced on stage on Oct 9, 2026.
FAQ
Do I need to know Python?
No. The platform scores an output file and never sees your code. Agentic coding tools, any programming language, and no-code platforms are all equally legal.
Can I just upload the data to a chat assistant?
For the practice files, yes, and it is a fine way to start. Scored sets run to thousands of rows and rotate weekly, so a repeatable system is what survives.
What tools are allowed?
Everything, including teams of humans and agents. Two things are banned: sharing solutions across teams, and more than one account per person.
Where does the AI run?
In your environment, on your keys or your hardware. Your spend is your own; the per-submission scoring here is free.
Key dates
- P0Registration opens20 Aug 2026
- P1Registration closes06 Sep 2026
- P2Qualifier submissions close20 Sep 2026
- P3Finalists announced02 Oct 2026
- P4Finals + winners at Cypher 202607–09 Oct 2026