Hackathon problem statements 2026: 40 real problems by domain

Updated 11 Oct 2026

A problem statement tells you who has a problem, what the problem is and what a good solution must do. Below are 40 problem statements, grouped by domain, each with a suggestion for what a hackathon-sized prototype could look like. Use them to practise, to pitch in an open-innovation track, or to find your angle on an organizer’s theme.

How to pick a problem statement

1. Pick a user you can talk to. If you can interview a farmer, a shopkeeper or a nurse this week, you will build something better.
2. Check that it fits the time. You need one flow working end to end in 24 to 48 hours. Cut everything else.
3. Look for data or APIs you can actually use. A great idea without data becomes a mock-up.
4. Make the impact easy to show. Judges should see the before and after in your demo.

AI and agentic AI

• Government scheme finder: citizens don’t know which welfare schemes they qualify for. Build an assistant in Indian languages that asks a few questions and lists eligible schemes with the documents needed.
• Customer support agent for small sellers: online sellers spend hours on order, return and refund questions. Build an agent that reads order data and resolves common tickets, handing hard ones to a human.
• Bug-fixing agent: teams lose time on small, well-defined bugs. Build an agent that reads an issue, finds the relevant code, proposes a fix and runs the tests.
• Meeting-to-tasks agent: decisions from calls get lost. Turn a meeting transcript into tasks with owners and deadlines in a project tool.
• Document Q&A for a college: students can’t find answers in long circulars and syllabi. Build a cited, retrieval-based assistant over the college’s PDFs.

Healthcare

• Symptom triage for rural clinics: health workers need help deciding who to refer. Build a guided triage checklist that flags red-flag symptoms, with a doctor always in the loop.
• Medicine reminder for elderly patients: missed doses are common. Build a reminder that works over WhatsApp or a basic phone call, with a family dashboard.
• Hospital bed and queue visibility: patients don’t know wait times. Show live OPD queue and bed availability for a hospital.
• Prescription digitiser: handwritten prescriptions are hard to track. Turn a photo into a structured medicine list with doses.

Education

• Doubt solver in regional languages: students study in their mother tongue but help is in English. Build a doubt-solving assistant for one subject in Hindi, Marathi or Tamil.
• Attendance without roll calls: roll calls waste lecture time. Build a quick, privacy-respecting attendance system.
• Personalised practice: every student gets the same worksheet. Generate practice questions from a student’s past mistakes.
• Placement readiness tracker: students don’t know what to prepare. Map a student’s skills to job descriptions and suggest a plan.

Agriculture

• Crop disease detection: farmers spot disease late. Identify common leaf diseases from a phone photo and suggest next steps in the local language.
• Mandi price advisor: farmers sell at the wrong time or place. Show prices across nearby mandis and a simple sell-or-hold suggestion.
• Water scheduling: over-watering wastes water and power. Recommend irrigation timing from weather and soil moisture.
• Farm-to-buyer marketplace: middlemen take a big share. Connect farmer groups directly with bulk buyers.

FinTech

• UPI scam detector: people lose money to fake payment requests. Flag suspicious UPI requests and messages before the user pays.
• Expense tracker from SMS: people don’t know where money goes. Categorise spending from bank SMS on the phone, privately.
• Credit for gig workers: thin-file borrowers can’t get loans. Build an alternative credit score from cash-flow data, with explanations.
• Paper-trading bot with guardrails: beginners lose money on impulsive trades. Build a rules-based trading bot that never breaks set risk limits.

Climate and sustainability

• Heatwave alerts: outdoor workers face dangerous heat. Send hyper-local heat alerts and safe-hours advice.
• Waste segregation helper: households mix waste. Identify the bin for an item from a photo.
• Carbon footprint for small businesses: MSMEs can’t measure emissions. Estimate a monthly footprint from electricity and fuel bills.
• Flood response coordination: relief efforts are scattered. Map requests for help and match them with volunteers and supplies.

Smart cities and mobility

• Pothole reporting: complaints go nowhere. Let citizens report potholes with a photo and location, and show the status publicly.
• Parking finder: drivers circle for parking. Show nearby free slots from crowd reports or sensors.
• Bus arrival prediction: buses have no reliable timings. Predict arrival times from past trips.
• Accessible routes: wheelchair users can’t plan routes. Show step-free routes and accessible entrances.

Cybersecurity

• Phishing link checker: fake links spread on WhatsApp. Check a link and explain the risk in plain language.
• Password hygiene for small offices: shared passwords are everywhere. Audit and improve password practices for a small team.
• Deepfake voice warning: voice-clone scams target families. Detect signs of a cloned voice in a call recording.
• Log anomaly alerts: small teams miss attacks. Flag unusual login patterns from server logs.

Governance and accessibility

• Grievance routing: complaints reach the wrong department. Classify and route citizen complaints automatically.
• Sign language helper: deaf users struggle at service counters. Translate common phrases between text and sign language.
• Form filling for low-literacy users: government forms are hard. Fill a form through voice in the user’s language.

How to write your own problem statement

Organizers and open-innovation tracks reward a sharp problem. Use this template:

1. Who: the specific user (for example, “first-generation college students in tier-2 cities”).
2. Problem: what goes wrong for them today, in one sentence.
3. Evidence: a number, a quote from a user, or a news report.
4. Constraints: low bandwidth, regional languages, cheap phones, privacy.
5. Success: what changes if you solve it, and how you would measure it.

Tip: Once you have a problem, see hackathon project ideas for tech stacks, and how to win a hackathon for the pitch.

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