A buzzer, a soil-moisture probe and a radio link: that is the heart of JALDRISHTI, the flood early-warning system that took 1st runner-up at IIT Jammu's Energy Make-a-thon 2026.
The event
The Make-a-thon, also called Energy Hackathon 2026, was a 36-hour on-site prototyping challenge organised by the Tinkering Lab and Protospace under the Institute Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Centre (I2EDC) at IIT Jammu. It began at 9 pm on Friday, October 23, 2026 and ended at 9 am on Sunday, October 25. Sixteen teams took part: nine from IIT Jammu and seven external, six of them from SMVDU and one from MIET Jammu.
The team and the prize
Bhartik Sharma, Madhav Sharma and Virendra Charan, third-year B.Tech students in Mathematics and Computing at SMVDU's School of Mathematics, finished 1st runner-up. According to SMVDU, the team is now eligible for a Rs 3,00,000 pre-incubation grant to take the solution toward commercialisation.
How JALDRISHTI works
- A Pod sits at the hazard point. Its soil-moisture probe detects floodwater and sounds an on-site buzzer, and it sends its status over a LoRa radio link.
- A Station, about 100 metres away, receives that status and combines rainfall forecasts from the Open-Meteo service with a terrain score to compute a flood-risk value.
- The higher the risk, the shorter the time the sensor must stay wet before the alert fires. Alerts go to a live dashboard that logs the reasoning and the measured response time.
Why it matters here
Jammu's rivers and hill slopes make flood and landslide warnings a local concern, and the story shows a route from a campus prototype to pre-incubation funding. SMVDU's Head of the School of Mathematics, Dr Rakesh Kumar, called it a triumphant achievement. The university has not said whether the grant has been confirmed by IIT Jammu; that detail comes from SMVDU alone.
Source: SMVDU, October 28, 2026.
Photo: file photo by Dayal Godara / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0); it does not show the event or notice described.
