# SIH 2026 Winner's Playbook: Free Winning PPTs, Rules & 26 Jury Questions > Three real SIH winning PPTs to download free, SPOC and team rules, a PPT checklist and 26 jury questions, from an SIH 2025 National Winner. By Zaid Sayyed · Published 2026-08-22, updated 2026-09-17 · 5 min read · https://zaidsayyed.in/blog/sih-2026 Over **80% of teams get eliminated before writing a single line of code** — mostly by missing college SPOC dates, picking the wrong 6-person team, or selecting dead problem statements. Tap any topic below to unlock the exact checklists, testing simulators, and templates. Looking for the jury questions? Sixteen are in [topic 07](https://zaidsayyed.in/blog/sih-2026?topic=jury), and [topic 08](https://zaidsayyed.in/blog/sih-2026?topic=room) adds ten more that arrive sideways after the demo. Each one carries the answer most teams give and the one that actually lands. ₹1,50,000 · Prize / Problem · 6 · Members / Team · 45 · Teams / College · 36 Hrs · Grand Finale Hack > Interactive section, available on the web page: https://zaidsayyed.in/blog/sih-2026 ## Questions I actually get asked These come from DMs and mentoring calls, not from a list of what people search for. They are the ones that repeat. ### "I'm a first year with no coding background. Can I still do SIH? Can I use AI to build the prototype?" Yes to both, and the second one is not cheating — most teams in 2026 are using AI to build. Juries do not ask how you built it. They ask whether it works and whether you understand the problem. But the real risk for a first year is not losing SIH. **It is getting cut from the team before SIH starts.** Teams are six people, seniors form them quickly, and the first person dropped is always the one who "will learn later." So do not try to become a competitive coder in three weeks — you will lose that comparison to a third year. Own a job most teams are missing and nobody volunteers for: - **Domain research.** Actually read the full statement, find the ministry's own reports, understand why the problem exists. Almost no team does this, and it shows the moment a juror asks why it matters. - **Documentation and slides.** Teams with working code still get rejected here. - **Demo operator.** Be the person who makes sure it runs on the day. Teams lose rounds to laptops, not to logic. One thing that works better than it should: pick three statements, read them completely, and write one page on each about who suffers from that problem today. Show that page to any team you approach. Nobody does this, and it makes you visibly useful before you have written a line of code. ### "How many teams does my college send forward?" The ceiling is **45 nominations** — 30 software, 15 hardware — and most colleges do not fill it. The practical shape at a mid-size college is closer to forty teams registering, about half actually submitting, and a handful going forward. That makes the internal round the steepest cut in the entire process, and it happens before SIH has technically begun. Most people spend their preparation on the finale and improvise the round that actually eliminates them. ### "Should we pick a hardware or a software statement?" Hardware statements have a smaller field, which sounds like an advantage and sometimes is. But they are unforgiving: you cannot fake a sensor at 3am, components have delivery times, and a prototype that does not physically work has nowhere to hide. Pick hardware only if someone on the team has actually built with the components before. "We'll learn Arduino" is not a plan at this stage. ### "Everyone is picking the popular statements. Should I avoid them?" Partly. The statements that read as easy attract the most teams, so you compete against the largest field with the least differentiation. But do not swing to the opposite extreme and pick something impossible just because it is empty. The question is not popular versus obscure — it is whether your specific team can ship a convincing version of it in thirty-six hours. That is the actual filter, and it is why the [problem statement matcher](https://zaidsayyed.in/tools/sih-problem-statements) scores statements against your team's real skills rather than against how impressive they sound. It also tells you which skill you are missing, which is usually the fact that decides it. If you would rather browse than search, the statements are split across seventeen themes, and each theme page shows how crowded it is and which statements nobody has picked yet. The biggest are [smart automation](https://zaidsayyed.in/tools/sih-problem-statements/theme/smart-automation) with 55, [blockchain and cybersecurity](https://zaidsayyed.in/tools/sih-problem-statements/theme/blockchain-and-cybersecurity) with 31, [agriculture, foodtech and rural development](https://zaidsayyed.in/tools/sih-problem-statements/theme/agriculture-foodtech-and-rural-development) with 27, [disaster management](https://zaidsayyed.in/tools/sih-problem-statements/theme/disaster-management) with 25 and [MedTech, BioTech and HealthTech](https://zaidsayyed.in/tools/sih-problem-statements/theme/medtech-biotech-healthtech) with 20. The quieter ones are worth a look for the same reason everyone ignores them: [space technology](https://zaidsayyed.in/tools/sih-problem-statements/theme/space-technology), [robotics and drones](https://zaidsayyed.in/tools/sih-problem-statements/theme/robotics-and-drones), [transportation and logistics](https://zaidsayyed.in/tools/sih-problem-statements/theme/transportation-and-logistics) and [clean and green technology](https://zaidsayyed.in/tools/sih-problem-statements/theme/clean-and-green-technology). ## Where you are in the timeline SIH moves in phases, and advice that is useful in one phase is noise in another: 1. **Team formation** — six members, and the constraints are real. Sort this before you fall in love with a statement. 2. **Problem statement selection** — the decision with the longest tail. Get it wrong and everything after is harder. 3. **College internal round** — the steepest cut. Covered in detail in the [internal round playbook](https://zaidsayyed.in/blog/sih-2026-internal-hackathon-guide). 4. **Screening and submission** — where preparation stops being about code. 5. **Grand finale** — thirty-six hours, and by then the outcome is mostly already decided. If you are reading this during internals, skip ahead to the playbook. The rest of this page will still be here afterwards. > Interactive section, available on the web page: https://zaidsayyed.in/blog/sih-2026 --- Source: https://zaidsayyed.in/blog/sih-2026