Annapurna is a real-time platform connecting food donors, NGOs and volunteers, built with React and Supabase, designed to reduce food waste by making surplus food visible to the people who need it in the time it's still safe to eat.
It didn't stop at the demo
Most hackathon projects die the moment the judging ends. Annapurna won three separate rounds — because Team TechVerse kept iterating on it between events, not because we resubmitted the same demo. Each win came with real feedback that shaped the next version.
The technical decision that mattered most
Real-time state, not polling. Donors post surplus food, and volunteers and NGOs see it appear live — because food that's fresh at 2pm is a health risk by 6pm, and a platform that refreshes on a 30-second interval isn't actually solving the problem it claims to.
What building for social impact taught me
The technology is the easy part. The hard part is designing a flow simple enough that a volunteer with no technical background will actually use it under time pressure. Every screen we cut made the platform more useful, not less.
Code: github.com/Pranjulrathour/annapurna.live
GenAI engineer and AI product builder with 2+ years shipping production-grade AI systems: RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, hybrid retrieval and multi-modal apps across vision, speech and OCR, architected end to end from ingestion to deployment. Leads engineering for SCULT INDIA's 14-member team, founded the 500+ member TechVerse Enclave community and has mentored 200+ students. Three hackathon first prizes: Changethon 2025 (IIT Roorkee), Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025 (CSJMU Kanpur) and BYTEBATTLE (MeetKats).
Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
