Untimely heavy rains failed to dampen the spirit of IIM-Ranchi and BIT-Mesra students whose respective campus fests ended on Sunday.

While IIM-R had its two-day management fest Agon 5.0 at Suchana Bhavan, BIT hosted its three-day tech fest, Pantheon-19, on its sprawling Mesra campus.

IIM student Surabhi Sethi said that after initial screening, around 700 students took part in Agon 5.0. “Some 200 of them were from outstation institutions including XLRI in Jamshedpur and the IIMs at Lucknow and Udaipur,” she said.

Triparna Roy, a student organiser at BIT-Mesra, said that over 1,000 students, including 300 from institutions such as IIT-Kharagpur, IIEST-Shibpur and NIT-Silchar, as well as local institutions, including schools, took part in Pantheon. “We had five flagship events and 50 other events. The total prize money on offer is around Rs 1 lakh, it is a grand show,” Triparna said. “Flagship events covered paper presentations, coding, making concrete blocks, making and running bots and model-making for school students.

She added that some of the ideas floated by school students at Eureka, a model-making contest, were really thought-provoking such as the idea of clearing space of satellite debris presented by two girls, Swapna and Pallavi, of DAV Public School, Hehal.

The IIM fest, on the other hand, expectedly had contests related to solutions of problems described in case studies.

It also had other interesting events such as Cricket Mandi where contestants had to form the best possible cricket team by recruiting players through auctions, using a fixed amount of virtual money.

“Our prize money in all was Rs 3.11 lakh for 22 events,' said Subham Singh Roy, another IIM-Ranchi student. “One of these on crisis management, titled Encase, offered Rs 35,000, which was won by two teams of IIM-R titled Arbitrageurs and Update Down,” he grinned.

For visiting B-school students, the contests were great fun as they simulated real-life cases that needed solutions.

Asked about the standard of the contests at IIM-Ranchi, Rahulselvan T., a contestant from IIM-Lucknow said they got very interesting cases.

“I felt like I was solving a real time sustainability challenge. Contests like these prepare us for the real corporate grind that awaits us,” he smiled.

Both the fests did not only only have brain-storming, students also enjoyed a host of literary and cultural events.