Hackathon / 19 Oct 2026 / 4 min read
Taking DRISHTI to the Sentinel Hackathon finals
Our team was shortlisted for the offline finals of Sentinel Hackathon 2026. We took DRISHTI, an idea for bringing fragmented CCTV systems into a more useful view, to iHub Gujarat in Ahmedabad. Here are a few things I came back thinking about.
It is easy to say that bringing camera feeds together would help. Working out what that actually means for the person using the system is the more interesting part.
That was part of the thinking behind DRISHTI, our team Eklavya's project for the Sentinel Hackathon. CCTV infrastructure is often spread across separate systems. We explored the idea of a unified video management and analytics platform for policing and public safety. A hackathon prototype could only go so far, but it gave us a way to make the idea concrete enough to discuss.
Questions that stayed with me
From an engineering perspective, I found myself thinking about questions beyond a single demo: Who should be able to access a feed? How would someone find a relevant event without watching hours of video? What happens when a camera or network connection drops? We did not have complete answers to these questions. They helped me see how much work sits between an idea and a dependable tool.
The interface is one part of that work. The data flow, reliability, and clarity of what the system is showing matter too. Thinking through those gaps was useful, even where we could not address them during the hackathon.
At the finals
Being shortlisted meant we could present DRISHTI to people who had not been part of our discussions. Explaining the idea in a short time made me more aware of what we could show clearly and what was still an open question. It was also good to see other teams approaching their own problems in very different ways.
I am used to spending time on implementation details. Presenting made me step back and explain the problem first. That sounds simple, but it is easy to get lost in features when you have been close to a project.
After the event
We did not win. That was disappointing, but making it to the finals gave our team a chance to put the idea in front of others and think more carefully about how to explain it. I came back wanting to ask earlier not just "Can we build this?" but "What would someone need from it to trust it?"
I am grateful for the work our team put in and for the chance to present it. The event made me more curious about what it would take to make an idea like this useful outside a hackathon.