India’s Hackathon Scene Just Got a League System - and It’s Wild by Design

Build wild. Win loud. Don’t quit.

Hackathons have long been treated as weekends of caffeine-fuelled chaos – intense, inspiring, and usually forgotten by Monday morning.

With AI generating prototypes in hours and developer attention becoming increasingly fragmented, this model is beginning to unravel. One-off demos no longer reflect how modern builders learn, iterate, or grow.

The Maximally Grand Indian Hackathon Season (GIHS) is a direct response to that shift.

Instead of a single event, GIHS is positioning itself as India’s first hackathon league: a three-month competitive season running from September to November 2025, composed of eight radically different hackathons, each with its own philosophy, prizes, and judging logic, yet all feeding into a shared, ever-growing prize pool that culminates in a grand finale.

This event isn’t just a longer hackathon. It’s a structural rethink of how builders compete, collaborate, and evolve.

From One-Off Events to a Competitive Season

At the core of GIHS is a simple but bold idea: hackathons aren’t isolated contests — they’re cultural moments.

The season runs from September 28 to November 15, with winners announced on November 30, and functions more like a sports league than a traditional competition. Each hackathon crowns its own winners, but performance across the season compounds into larger recognition and rewards.

The prize pool has already crossed ₹17,00,000, and it’s explicitly designed to grow as new partners, sponsors, and communities join mid-season, a rarity in the hackathon world, where rewards are typically fixed upfront.

Participants don’t just compete once; they return, iterate, fail publicly, and try again. Consistency matters. Growth matters. Community presence matters.

Eight Hackathons, Eight Philosophies

Rather than repeating the same “build the best app” prompt, GIHS deliberately fractures the format into eight distinct creative experiments:

• Code Hypothesis - rewarding clarity of experimentation over success
• Protocol 404 - celebrating systems that survive while broken
• Project CodeGen - where playful, joyful builds score just as high as serious ones
• Maximally Hacktober - a month-long open build sprint
• PromptStorm - a 24-hour AI-first speed hack
• Steal-A-Thon - where original ideas are banned and remixing is mandatory
• Codepocalypse - raw, absurd, end-of-the-internet builds
• Grand Tech Assembly - a GTA-styled sandbox jam focused on immersion and world-building

Each event awards ₹2,00,000 in combined cash and tech credits, alongside certificates, platform-wide recognition, Discord badges, zine features, and optional letters of recommendation.

Together, they form something closer to a creative ecosystem than a competition.

Chaos as a Judging Principle

Perhaps the most unconventional element of GIHS is how projects are evaluated.

Instead of polish, scale, or investor readiness, judges are asked questions like:

• Can chaos become clarity?
• Can a system stay broken and still work?
• Can theft feel original?
• Can play be productive?

Failure isn’t penalised if it produces insight. Absurdity is welcomed if it reveals creativity. Speed, remix culture, and emotional impact are treated as first-class signals.

This philosophy has resonated with a judging panel that spans Big Tech, startups, product leadership, AI research, design, and marketing.

A Judge Roster That Reads Like a Tech Conference Lineup

GIHS brings together an unusually broad and senior judging panel, including:

Sergey Polyashov, Principal Software Engineering Manager @ Microsoft

Jay Rungta, Engineering Manager @ Google

Abhishek Shrivastava, Senior Staff Software Engineer @ Google

Sahil Deshpande, Software Engineer @ Meta

Senthilkumaran Rajagopalan, Tech Lead Manager, Video Recommendations @ Meta

Prateek Batla, Product Manager @ Meta

Alexandr Dergunov, Software Engineer @ Meta

Aleksandr Karavanin, Production Engineer @ Meta

Ashwini Joshi, Senior Machine Learning Engineer @ Warner Bros. Discovery

Krishna Arjun Saravanan, Senior Software Engineer @ Bloomberg

Jay Bharat Mehta, Senior Software Engineer @ Snowflake

Venkataram Poosapati, Senior Data Engineer @ Atlassian

Yogiraj Awati, Engineering Manager @ Instacart

Sai Charan Reddy Nevuri, Software Engineer @ AWS

Rakesh Pullayikodi, Staff Software Engineer @ Palo Alto Networks

Vikranth Kumar Shivaa, Founding Engineer @ Fig

Tanmay Kejriwal, Founder @ MakeX

Shreesh Agarwal, Senior Business Analyst @ McKinsey & Company

Ashish Singh, Sr. IT Architect @ Global Payments

Sumit Saha, Software Engineer @ Microsoft

Puneet Ramaul, Senior Sales Director @ HCLTech

Akash Jindal, Product Owner @ Lloyds Banking Group

Dmitry Bobolev, Founder of Froxy Labs

Arvind K Gautam, ASEAN Lead @ Avaya

Raja Sekhar Rai Dheekonda, Distinguished Engineer @ Dreadnode

Nikita Klimov, Sr. Software QA Engineer (Contractor) @ ADP, Inc.

Ruslan Ibrahimov and Bohdan Churik, Senior Software Engineers @ VoiceLove

Pablo Rios, Software Engineer @ Metal

Abhinay Kumar Reddy Seella, Sr. Software Engineer @ Roku

Karthikeyan Sundaram, Backend Software Engineer @ WithU

Anil Kumar, Software Engineer @ Paua

Anastasia Glavatchi, Head of Marketing

Aleksandr Ruban, Marketing Expert in the Game Industry

Assiya Jaisheva, Design Lead

Oleg Skliarenko, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer @ DRCT

The result is judging that values technical depth, product sense, storytelling, and cultural impact in equal measure.

Open by Design - Not Just for Coders

GIHS is explicitly open to coders, no-coders, beginners, designers, and indie makers. Submissions can be anything from GitHub repos and Replit demos to Figma prototypes, Webflow builds, or Notion systems.

What matters is not the stack, but the idea, the experiment, and the intent.

Alongside formal awards, the season introduces Discord-native recognitions like Most Active Hacker, Funniest Demo, Best Chaos Log, and Community Choice, reinforcing that participation itself has value.

A New Template for Developer Culture?

In an era where developer attention is fragmented and AI has lowered the barrier to building, GIHS feels less like a competition and more like a social infrastructure for builders.

By stretching a hackathon into a season, rewarding consistency over one-off wins, and embracing chaos instead of polish, the Grand Indian Hackathon Season may be pointing toward a new global format - one where experimentation, community, and culture matter as much as code.

This isn’t just a hackathon.

It’s a season.