Gujarat Police Sentinel Hackathon pays Rs 18 lakh to AI-CCTV winners

Gujarat Police closed the first phase of its Gujarat Police Innovation Challenge 2026, also called the Sentinel Hackathon 2026, at i-Hub in Ahmedabad on October 13, 2026, and gave winning teams a total of Rs 18 lakh in cash prizes. The two-day event asked innovators to build artificial intelligence (AI) tools that work with the state's CCTV camera network. Deputy Chief Minister Harsh Sanghavi presided over the closing ceremony, and the state has said Rs 51 lakh in prize money is available across the challenge's two phases.

For small technology companies, the hardest step is often finding a first serious customer. A government department that publishes a real problem, opens it to anyone and pays prize money is offering more than a trophy: it is a chance to show a working product to the people who may later buy it. Gujarat Police's challenge drew more than 3,100 registrations, which shows how many developers, students and young firms are willing to work on public safety problems when the door is open.

The problem itself is practical. Police forces now have far more camera footage than officers can watch. Automatic number plate recognition, or ANPR, is software that reads vehicle registration plates from video so that a car can be found without a person checking every frame. Vehicle tracking follows the same car across several cameras. Watchlist matching compares what the cameras see against a list of vehicles or people that police are already looking for. Video analytics is the wider term for software that scans video and flags events automatically.

Speaking at the ceremony, Harsh Sanghavi said the aim of bringing in AI and software integration is to cut the time officers spend on routine tasks and to free up the working hours of thousands of constables and officers. Director General of Police G.S. Malik said linking the state's CCTV network with AI and video analytics could help prevent crime, identify suspicious individuals quickly and send real-time alerts.

At the same event, the Ahmedabad City Crime Branch launched two tools. One, called Prati Raksha, is described by the organisers as the country's first consent-based digital identity verification system recognised by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). The other, Pathik 2.0, is meant to check the identities of people employed in hotels, paying-guest homes and industrial units through real-time QR codes and face verification.

For founders outside the big metros, the format is worth noting. A state-run challenge with published problems, open registration and staged prizes is one of the few routes where a small team can compete with larger vendors on the quality of a demonstration rather than on size or contacts.

Short-term: Winning teams receive cash and a direct line to senior police officers who can judge whether their tools work in the field. The state's announcement that more prize money is available in a second phase keeps the competition open for other teams.

Long-term: If the police adopt some of these tools, start-ups that took part could gain a reference customer in government, which helps when they approach other states or departments. Wider use of AI on CCTV networks also raises questions about privacy, data handling and accuracy that the police and the companies will need to answer in public.

Who is affected: Technology start-ups, student teams and independent developers in Gujarat and elsewhere; police officers who spend long hours on manual checks; and residents whose movements are recorded by public cameras.

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