A team of mid-career Master’s candidates from Harvard Kennedy School, Aarushi Jain (Policy Director, Indian School of Business), Manish Maheshwari (General Partner and India Head, BAT VC), Mohammed Y Safirulla K (IAS officer), Ashish Tiwari (IPS officer) and Manudev Jain (IRS officer), has clinched first place in the ‘AI for Good Hackathon’, organised by the Centre for International Development, HKS, Harvard University as part of the Road to GEM: Global Empowerment Meeting 2025 – Catalysing AI for Inclusive Change.
Their winning entry, MEGHA – Meghalaya E-Governance Human-Centred Assistance, is a toll-free, voice-first AI agent that guides rural citizens through government scheme applications by providing eligibility checks, document lists and step-by-step instructions.
Every response is strictly grounded in verified official documents, and MEGHA captures personal details only with explicit consent. It can also email concise call summaries to both citizens and nodal officers, while anonymised interaction data informs more inclusive policy design.
“MEGHA was born from the conviction that AI can bridge the gap between rural citizens and their entitlements,” said Jain. “No community should ever be left behind and we’re committed to partnering with governments across India to ensure these vital benefits reach everyone.”
Over the eight-hour sprint, multidisciplinary teams from Harvard and MIT mastered tools such as voDev, Replit, Jotform AI Agent Builder and PingPong to produce functional prototypes under tight deadlines.
Other submissions included platforms for Harvard alumni career development, youth-empowerment initiatives and policy-research dashboards, as well as AI-driven enhancements for emergency call lines and automated grading of handwritten tests in regional languages.
The judges, Prof Fatema Z. Sumar, Executive Director of the Center for International Development and Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and Prof Hong Qu, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, provided expert feedback and selected MEGHA as the winner, underscoring a shared conviction that when AI is centred on human needs, it becomes a powerful catalyst for inclusive change.
The team now aims to partner with the government to pilot and implement MEGHA in the communities it was built to serve.
