In a village in north Karnataka, the nearest pharmacy is 20 kilometres away. For most people, this is simply an inconvenience to plan around. For a young woman named Pallavi, it became a question worth solving.
What if medicines could be dispensed the way cash is, through a machine as common as an ATM?
That idea found its way onto a national stage this June. Pallavi was one of 6,151 young women from 23 states who took part in WitchHunt 2026, India’s first AI-powered hackathon designed for girls and young women.
Organised by HopeWorks Foundation along with AI4India and the Karnataka Digital Economy Mission, the initiative set out to do something hackathons rarely attempt: bring women from the country’s smaller towns and overlooked villages into India’s AI conversation, rather than asking them to catch up with it later.
A six-year mission
WitchHunt did not appear out of nowhere. For six years, HopeWorks Foundation has worked towards a singular, ambitious goal: getting a million girls from underserved communities into college and, eventually, into meaningful employment.
Jacintha Jayachandran, the foundation’s Founder Trustee, has spent that time identifying the barriers that often hold girls back, from access to education and mentorship to gaps in basic health awareness.
Then AI arrived, and with it, a new and unexpected worry. As Jayachandran puts it, the girls the foundation worked with began to wonder whether artificial intelligence was simply one more barrier stacked against them.
The foundation’s early response was a series of AI master classes, but the pace of the technology quickly outran the format. What these young women needed was not another lecture about AI.
They needed to use it themselves, on problems they actually recognised from their own lives. That realisation became the seed of WitchHunt, which also fits into a broader national push to bring frontier technology like AI into classrooms for millions of students across India.
From idea to working prototype
What makes WitchHunt distinct from a typical 24-hour hackathon is how carefully it was designed.
The hackathon saw 6,151 registered participants form 1,250 teams. Of these, 779 teams submitted ideas by April 8.
The foundation now plans to release a white paper distilling lessons from the journey, with several jury members offering internships to finalists.
Nearly 300 mentors then spent more than a month helping teams sharpen their concepts into working prototypes, while structured bootcamps covered AI literacy, design thinking and ethics.
The result was 373 functional proofs of concept, a 30% submission-to-prototype rate that organisers say is roughly double the typical industry average for hackathons.
Healthcare emerged as the most popular category, drawing 275 submitted ideas and 128 prototypes. Many addressed accessibility gaps or built digital tools to support overworked health workers and expecting mothers in high-risk pregnancies.
Smart cities followed with 235 ideas, education with 178, and climate action, the smallest but still significant category, produced 92 ideas.
One participant from a Tier II city noticed that her town’s CCTV cameras recorded everything but alerted no one, so she built an AI layer that pushes real-time alerts to hospitals and emergency responders the moment an accident occurs.
It is the kind of practical, locally rooted thinking that mirrors how young innovators across India have used AI to solve problems specific to their own communities.
Levelling an uneven field
Perhaps the most striking feature of WitchHunt is what it deliberately ignores: pedigree. A participant from a small town competed using the same mentors, resources, and learning platform as a student from a premier technology institute.
Women made up 73% of all participants, and 98% were between 18 and 30, a demographic that India’s innovation ecosystem has historically struggled to draw out of underserved regions.
The approach echoes other Indian efforts working to close the rural-urban gap in technology education through accessible robotics and coding programmes, and builds on a longer tradition of enabling rural women through skill-based, structured mentorship.
The foundation’s early response was a series of AI master classes, but the pace of the technology quickly outran the format. What these young women needed was not another lecture about AI.
The top 40 teams, ten from each theme, competed at the grand finale held in Bengaluru on June 13 and 14, with Karnataka state ministers and senior tech industry leaders in attendance.
The winning team in each of the four categories took home Rs 2.5 lakh, with runners-up and special mentions sharing a total prize pool of Rs 18 lakh, alongside fully covered travel and stay for all finalists.
Beyond the finale
For Jayachandran, the real victory is not just the prototypes but the imagination they represent. A child in a village with no healthcare access conceiving of a medicine-dispensing machine, she says, is proof that the ability to identify problems and believe in solving them has already taken root.
The foundation now plans to release a white paper distilling lessons from the journey, with several jury members offering internships to finalists. A new edition is already being planned, continuing the foundation’s broader aim of ensuring no girl, regardless of her postcode, is left out of India’s AI future.
Images courtesy of Witch Hunt
