Viksit Bharat Buildathon 2025 Enters Guinness World Records

Viksit Bharat Buildathon (VBB) 2025 has been entered in the Guinness World Records as the “Largest Innovation Solution Competition”, on the strength of 2,87,967 project submissions from school students. The certificate was handed over in New Delhi at a function where the Union Minister of State for Education, Shri Jayant Chaudhary, honoured the ten national winning teams.

Who ran the contest

The Buildathon was conducted by the Department of School Education and Literacy (DoSEL) of the Union Ministry of Education, together with the Atal Innovation Mission of NITI Aayog and the All-India Council for Technical Education. It was built on four pillars: Atmanirbhar Bharat, Swadeshi, Vocal for Local and Samriddh Bharat. Students were not handed a problem statement or a ready answer; they had to spot a problem of their own and build a way around it.

How the winners were picked

Entries came in under two tracks, Idea and Prototype, and were judged at three levels by panels drawn from several disciplines. District panels screened first, then state panels, and finally a national panel.

Prize money

An award pool of more than Rs 1 crore was set aside across the three levels. The ten national teams shared Rs 17.50 lakh. Each of the five top teams in the Prototype Track, judged on a working model, received Rs 2,50,000, while each of the five winners in the Idea Track got Rs 1,00,000 to take their concept into incubation. The teams felicitated came from Assam, Delhi, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Jammu and Kashmir, Keralam, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.

ULLAS guidelines released

At the same function the Minister released the Guidelines for Teacher Education Institutions under ULLAS – Nav Bharat Saaksharta Karyakram, the adult literacy programme. Student teachers enrolled in NCTE-recognised courses such as B.Ed., B.P.Ed., M.Ed. and M.P.Ed. will serve as Volunteer Teachers, and each will help five to eight non-literate learners become literate and certified, earning academic credit when a learner is certified. Prizes were also given to school winners of a quiz on e-waste, and e-waste gathered under Special Campaign 6.0 was handed to an authorised recycler.