The Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad, proudly announces that CricSM AI, developed by sRCg Solution under the leadership of Prof. Partha Pratim Mandal, Assistant Professor, Department of Applied Geophysics, has won the IndiaAI Hackathon on Mineral Targeting 2025. The award ceremony took place on November 5, 2025, at Electronics Niketan, CGO Complex, New Delhi.
The winning team consists of Dr. Pradeep Kumar Shukla, Litan Dutta, Dinesh Munda, Tanmay Singh, and Sai Satyam Jena, who worked collaboratively with Prof. Mandal to create an advanced AI-driven mineral targeting system.
The national-level competition was organised by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India. Beginning in March 2025, the hackathon covered registration, solution submission, evaluations, and final presentations over several months. The event aimed to harness the potential of artificial intelligence for mineral exploration across India.
CricSM AI stood out for its capability to generate critical and strategic mineral mapping across regions such as Jharkhand, southern Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. The system integrates large language models (LLMs), the Naini model, ensemble machine learning techniques, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to predict deposits of gold, diamond, graphite, rare earth elements, copper, iron, and manganese, with uncertainty quantification.
By synthesising multidisciplinary geoscientific datasets, the team produced an exceptionally precise mineral prospectivity map, including depth evaluation for concealed and deep-seated deposits. This marks a major advancement in AI-assisted geoscience and resource exploration.
The award was conferred by Prof. Ajay Kumar Sood, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India; Shri S. Krishnan, Secretary; Shri Abhishek Singh, Additional Secretary; and other senior MeitY officials. Their recognition highlights India’s increasing focus on advanced AI-based innovation in natural resource discovery.
This achievement further strengthens IIT (ISM) Dhanbad’s legacy as a leader in geoscience, mining engineering, and computational research. CricSM AI now stands as a benchmark for future AI-driven mineral exploration initiatives across the country.