Prominent AI content creator and tech entrepreneur Varun Mayya released the official competition guidelines for Build What Moves India, a high-stakes hackathon organised alongside the OpenAI team to overhaul the country’s public digital services.
Following an unexpected surge of more than 5,000 registrations, Mayya laid out the technical specifications, judging metrics, and incentive structure aimed at mobilising the domestic developer and creator ecosystem.
The initiative asks independent builders to redesign citizen-facing digital infrastructure, prioritising clean user experience over backend complexity.
Participants are invited to select one of 10 designated public service platforms and produce a functional proof of concept using simulated citizen data.
Mayya emphasised that the competition values interface intuition and practical citizen utility over decorative animations, urging entrants to focus on ideas rather than exhaustive codebases.
Builders can participate either individually or in teams of two, provided both partners register identical credentials across all stages.
The initial round requires teams to submit an active browser-accessible link, a two-minute recorded demonstration video explaining product choices, and a 250-word written summary by August 28 at 8 p.m. IST.
The evaluation process will filter the candidate pool down to 250 selected projects between August 28 and September 1.
Those shortlisted teams will enter a dedicated weeklong mentorship sprint inside a private WhatsApp group, receiving direct feedback from senior software engineers and OpenAI ecosystem specialists to refine their prototypes.
Teams will then submit their updated iterations by September 7 before a panel selects the top 10 finalists.
Those selected groups will travel to Bengaluru on September 12 to present their civic solutions in person before venture founders, top creators, technical mentors, and invited government representatives.
Incentives for finalists include annual subscriptions to developer tooling and hardware. The top 10 entrants will receive access to developer tier subscriptions, the top three finishers will take home Apple MacBook computers, and the overall winner will receive a sponsored trip to San Francisco.
Mayya, who previously founded the community software platform Avalon and built multiple generative AI productivity tools, produces video content on technology and startup strategy for hundreds of thousands of digital followers.
His effort represents a growing trend among Indian creators who use their audience leverage to bridge the gap between grassroots technical talent and public governance.
