Viksit Bharat Buildathon winners to be honoured October 28 after Guinness record

Union Education Minister Pralhad Joshi will felicitate the national winners of the Viksit Bharat Buildathon 2025, a nationwide innovation contest for school students, at an event in New Delhi on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, the Ministry of Education said on October 27. Ten national-level winning teams and innovators will be honoured and their models shown. The Buildathon has also been certified by Guinness World Records as the "Largest Innovation Solution Competition", with 2,87,967 project submissions, and the ministry will use the same event to launch new guidelines for teacher education institutions under its ULLAS adult literacy programme.

The Buildathon was designed to get school students, not just engineering undergraduates, to identify local problems and build working solutions. Teams picked a problem under one of four themes linked to self-reliance and local products, then submitted either an idea or a working prototype. The scale of participation reported on the live day, more than one crore students across over three lakh schools, is what earned the record, and it reflects how widely schools were asked to take part.

For students and teachers, the ceremony closes the loop on a contest that ran its live event a year ago. The recognition of ten national winners gives schools a set of examples of what student innovation can look like, and the record certification adds visibility to the programme. The more lasting question is what happens to the ideas after the ceremony: whether winning teams get mentoring, access to tinkering labs under the Atal Innovation Mission, or links to incubators so that their prototypes can be developed further. The ministry's announcement does not yet spell this out.

The second part of the event concerns adult literacy. ULLAS – Nav Bharat Saaksharta Karyakram is the Centre's adult literacy programme, aimed at adults who did not get the chance to complete basic schooling. New guidelines for teacher education institutions, the colleges that train teachers, suggest that trainee teachers will be drawn into the literacy effort. The detailed contents of the guidelines have not yet been published.

The table sets out the Buildathon in numbers, as reported.

Short-term: Ten winning teams and their schools will be recognised nationally on October 28, and the Guinness certificate will be formally presented at the same event.

Long-term: If the ministry follows up with mentoring and incubation support, the Buildathon could become a regular pipeline for school-level innovation; the new ULLAS guidelines could also change how teacher training colleges take part in adult literacy work.

Who is affected: School students in Classes 6 to 12 and their teachers, schools with tinkering labs, teacher education institutions, and adult learners under the ULLAS programme.

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