Ravi Suhag has made it a habit of sorts to win hackathons .So far, Suhag has won 14 of the 16 hackathons he has participated in over the last four years, coming out on top at events organised by companies such as Sequoia and Times Internet, among others.
Born in a farmer's family, Suhag did not have a computer while growing up and got one only after joining college.As a child, Suhag spent the first half of his schooling years at a Hindi-medium village school in Jhajjar, Haryana, in the seventh grade, when his father came home with a new gadget, a combination of an FM radio and tape recorder, Suhag discovered a budding interest in electronics, like many other young Indians, he had set his sights on attending one of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). This despite the fact that his computer knowledge was limited to the likes of Microsoft Paint, and he’d only ever seen a computer at school, and never owned one himself.
But in a surprising turn of events, this wasn’t the case. “My mind went blank on the exam day,” Suhag said. “I couldn’t clear the IIT exam.” Suhag did manage to get into another engineering college—Kamrah Institute of Information Technology (KIIT) in Gurugram,
Today, Suhag works at ride-hailing platform GoJek, and runs his profitable private venture alongside. He’s also a consultant at the Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) at Harvard University, where he works with various rural ministries to reduce delays in making digital payments to workers. And ever since his first brush with hackathons during an early stint as a web developer in Gurugram in July 2013, Suhag has been making a name for himself in coding, too.
Suhag received an award at an event organised by the office of the president of India, the Festival of Innovation, for his work in digitizing entry into public monuments by creating a web platform and mobile app to replace manual ticket checkpoints.
While that’s proof that not attending a top institution doesn’t have to limit your career, Suhag believes there’s a lot more that can be done to create more success stories like himself.
Source and Credit : https://qz.com/india/995235/ravi-suhag-indias.