RAKSHAM hackathon: 5 student teams win up to Rs 2 lakh for AI tools against deepfakes

By TUF News Desk · Published 1 November 2026 · 3 min read

Fact-checked against 2+ independent sources · Editorial policy

Nearly 5,000 students from 14 states entered a national hackathon to build AI tools that catch online scams. Five teams came out on top.

Amazon India, the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) under the Union Ministry of Home Affairs announced the winners of RAKSHAM, the national AI cybersecurity hackathon, on October 30, 2026. The winning teams will receive cash prizes from Rs 25,000 up to Rs 2 lakh.

The contest asked students to work on the scams that AI has made harder to spot. Entries tackled cloned voices on phone calls, doctored faces in video verification, fraud detection, and scam patterns that can be intercepted before money changes hands.

How the contest ran

The field was cut to 30 finalists after an initial online submission round. Those teams then went through two rounds of jury evaluation over two days, ending in a 48-hour in-person finale at IIT Delhi on October 24 and 25, where they had to build, test and demonstrate working prototypes.

IIT Delhi’s student technical clubs ARIES and Dev Club ran the hackathon with the institute’s Office of Academic Outreach and New Initiatives. The jury was drawn from all three partners: Amit Gupta and Harman Singh from I4C, Kishore Thota from Amazon, and Shobhit Taneja from EasySocial.

Prizes and a December stage

The prize money was split across the five winning teams as Rs 2,00,000, Rs 1,00,000, Rs 50,000, Rs 25,000 and Rs 25,000, a total pool of Rs 4 lakh.

Money was only part of the reward. The top five teams will present their solutions at Amazon Smbhav 2026 on December 10 at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, in front of senior Amazon leaders and representatives from government, industry and academia. For student teams, that audience matters as much as the cheque, since it puts a working prototype in front of people who could take it further.

Why the organisers ran it

I4C’s Amit Gupta said AI has made digital services easier to reach, and at the same time given criminals new ways to exploit citizens through deepfakes, voice cloning and more sophisticated scams. His point was that the response has to move earlier: spot the threat and prevent harm, rather than only chasing it after the fraud.

Prof Pradyumna S., Dean of Student Affairs at IIT Delhi, made a similar point from the campus side. When voices, images and videos can be manipulated convincingly, telling real content from fabricated content is no longer straightforward, and that is why students were asked to build detection tools instead of just studying the problem.

The hackathon builds on the ongoing partnership between Amazon and I4C on safe internet use and scam awareness. Students looking for other funded opportunities can also check our guide to scholarships for Indian university students.

Details of the institute and its programmes are published on the official IIT Delhi website.

Frequently asked questions

What is the RAKSHAM hackathon?

RAKSHAM is a national AI cybersecurity hackathon run by Amazon India, IIT Delhi and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), where student teams built tools to counter deepfakes, voice cloning and online scams.

How many teams took part in RAKSHAM?

Nearly 5,000 students from 14 states submitted entries. Thirty teams reached the finals, and five were named winners.

What did the winning teams receive?

Cash prizes from Rs 25,000 to Rs 2 lakh, and a chance to present their solutions at Amazon Smbhav 2026 in New Delhi on December 10.

Who judged the RAKSHAM finals?

The jury included Amit Gupta and Harman Singh from I4C, Kishore Thota from Amazon, and Shobhit Taneja from EasySocial.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: Orissa Diary, The CSR Universe, Elets digitalLEARNING