Opportunities AI Minute Newsroom 2026-08-17

A 90-day agent-building contest opened on Friday: open to anyone anywhere, free to enter, ₹18 lakh in prizes, closes 15 November

Code for India launched 'Code for a Billion', a 90-day agentic-AI hackathon, on 15 August, India's 80th Independence Day. It is open to students, professionals and independent developers, solo or in teams, from anywhere in the world, and it costs nothing to enter. Entrants build open-source agent systems for Indian public health along three tracks: Saathi, an AI companion for frontline health workers; Nirog, a preventive-health digital twin; and Jan Swasth Map, a population-health dashboard. Every participant receives one million free smart-code tokens on the AgentFoundry.me development environment. The total prize pool is ₹18 lakh, awarded per track — ₹150,000 for first place, ₹100,000 for second and ₹50,000 for third — alongside sponsor awards and fast-track incubation for standout projects. Projects must be deployed and open-sourced by 15 November 2026, with winners announced on 5 December. The event runs fully online; optional meetups and demo days are planned in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Indore and Lucknow. Registration is through AgentFoundry.me, where you create the project and invite collaborators.

Why it mattersThe barrier here is unusually low: no institution required, no entry fee, no country restriction, and the compute credits come with it. What you are really buying with three months is a finished, deployed, open-source agent project with a named public-health problem behind it — which is a more useful thing to show a university or an employer than another chatbot demo. Ninety days is also enough time to actually finish, which is not true of most weekend hackathons.

#AI Agents #Health AI

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A 90-day agent-building contest opened on Friday: open to anyone anywhere, free to enter, ₹18 lakh in prizes, closes 15 November

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