Delhi Summer Camp 2.0: Three Days Inside the Top 60 (Part 2)

Picking up where Part 1 left off

Out of a group of 26, five of us got selected to attend Delhi Summer Camp 2.0. I was one of them. Part 1 covered how we got there. This is what the three days actually looked like.

The takeaway from this one: a government evaluating your prototype and a government being genuinely warm to you afterward aren't in tension — at this camp, they happened back to back, on purpose, and that combination is exactly what made it feel real instead of ceremonial.

Day 1 — July 1: Dr. Ambedkar International Centre → MCD Civic Centre

The day opened with BJP Delhi General Secretary Vishnu Mittal talking through how AI and modern technology are already reshaping something as unglamorous as booth and election management — not a keynote about hypothetical future tech, but about systems already running at scale.

From there we moved to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi's office, and this is where the day stopped being a lecture and started being work. Deputy Mayor Dr. Monika Pant, the MCD Commissioner, and a room full of MCD officers sat with us while we presented our solutions and got real guidance on what it would actually take to implement them. We had lunch there, and MCD sent us off with a small sapling as a keepsake — a nice touch, given how many of the Top 60 projects were themselves about making the city more livable.

We closed the day back at the Ambedkar Centre with Radhakanth Kodukula, Co-Founder and CTO at Antino, walking us through the story behind Raastafix.com — less a talk about his product and more a working session on how to actually think through implementation and problem-solving once the demo stage is over.

Looking around that first day, it was obvious we weren't the only ones with a traffic problem to solve. Somewhere in that same cohort was a team building a drone-based air quality monitoring platform, another working on a Chief Minister's Grievance Dashboard challenge, another on smart parking. Sixty teams, sixty different angles on the same underlying question: what does a city actually need fixed, and can you prove it works before someone hands you the keys to try.

Day 2 — July 2: Delhi Secretariat

We arrived at 1 PM and had lunch, then were moved into the conference hall right beside the Chief Minister's own cabin — not a general auditorium, the room next to where she actually works.

The program opened with the echoes of Vande Mataram, and then Chief Minister Rekha Gupta laid out her vision for a Viksit Delhi. After that, the actual evaluation began, and it ran for hours — straight through until 6 PM, with only a fifteen-minute break for snacks in between. This wasn't a ceremonial Q&A. It was a real, sustained evaluation round, and everyone in that hall had already survived a national filter to even be sitting in it.

When we got back to our seats after the break, there were full backpacks waiting for us — nobody had announced it, they just appeared. Small thing, but it landed.

The Chief Minister came back at 6 PM to deliver her closing remarks, and her message stuck with the same thread from her earlier "Delhi 2.0" framing at India Innovates: that the specific, practical solutions this Top 60 cohort had presented — on traffic, waterlogging, pollution, digital services, citizen amenities — were going to be taken forward as real pilot projects with the relevant government departments, not filed away as a nice memory of a summer program. She talked about wanting to make Delhi a genuine "Civic Tech Hub," and the day closed on the "Viksit Bharat aur Viksit Delhi" line that's clearly become the throughline of this entire initiative.

We took a group photo, and then, less formally, a bunch of us just surrounded her for selfies. That sequence — hours of serious evaluation, then a Chief Minister sticking around afterward for photos with a room full of students — is the part that's hard to fake. You can stage a photo-op. You can't really stage six hours of actual evaluation followed by someone choosing to stay.

Day 3 — July 3: DelhiTech Trails

The last day was a genuine change of pace — a Delhi Tourism double-decker bus tour, starting from INA Haat, with Tourism Minister Kapil Mishra along for the ride.

We went past Vijay Chowk and got a look at the newly developed Central Vista project, then through the National Museum, the National Gallery of Modern Art, the Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya, and finally India Gate and the National War Memorial, before getting dropped back at INA Haat.

It read, at first, like a reward lap after two days of real work. But it also did something quieter: it was Delhi Tourism using the same "Top 60" cohort and the same civic-tech framing to launch its own new initiative, DelhiTech Trails — technology, tourism, and governance all pointed at the same idea of a modernizing city, using us as the first audience for it.

What actually stuck with me

The thing I keep coming back to isn't any single session — it's the sequencing. Government officials don't usually evaluate your prototype for six straight hours and then also want a selfie with you afterward. Those two things happening on the same day, in that order, is what made this feel like an actual pipeline instead of a photo-op dressed up as one. The evaluation was the real thing. The warmth afterward was the government's way of saying it noticed the effort behind it.

Sixty teams walked into that Secretariat hall with sixty different projects. All of them are now, at least in theory, headed toward the same destination: a real pilot project, with a real government department, actually trying to use what we built. That's a genuinely rare thing for a hackathon to promise, and rarer still for one to actually mean it.

Part 1 of this series covers how we got to the Top 60 in the first place — the PPT round, the 28,000 teams, the prototype presentation at Bharat Mandapam. This is where that story led.

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Repo for this project: github.com/SHT4BHARAT/TrafficManagement