Terms of Service.

By accessing the Pragati portal (https://pragati.blockchainclubaot.in), creating or joining a competition team, or submitting ideas and deliverables, you agree to be legally bound by these Terms of Service, all applicable competition regulations, and institutional guidelines.

If you do not agree with any provision of these terms, you must refrain from registering, forming teams, or participating in the competition.

Participation in Pragati 2026 is strictly reserved for currently enrolled undergraduate students of Academy of Technology (AOT), Hooghly, West Bengal.

All participants must authenticate exclusively using their designated college email account ending with @aot.edu.in. Authentication attempts utilizing personal email accounts (such as @gmail.com or @yahoo.com) are rejected by our access control systems.

Providing false, misleading, or borrowed credentials constitutes an immediate violation of academic integrity and will result in permanent disqualification from the competition and referral to the institutional disciplinary committee.

1. Team Size Constraints: Teams must consist of a minimum of 1 member and a maximum of 4 members. The platform enforces database-level capacity constraints; attempts to add more than 4 members are rejected.

2. Immutability of Team Identity: A team name is permanently locked upon creation. Team names cannot be modified after registration to ensure auditability and consistency across judging records.

3. Single Team Enrollment: A student may only belong to one active team at any given time. Database constraints prevent dual enrollment across multiple teams.

4. Team Leadership & Governance: The creator of a team is initially designated as Team Lead. The Team Lead holds administrative permissions to lock the team, approve or reject join requests, transfer leadership, kick teammates, or disband the team.

5. Deterministic Succession: If a Team Lead chooses to leave a team that contains remaining members, leadership is automatically and deterministically transferred to the earliest joined teammate.

All proposals, architectural designs, presentations, prototypes, and code submitted to Pragati 2026 must be the original work of the registered team members.

Plagiarism, intellectual property theft, code duplication from public repositories without explicit attribution, or submitting pre-existing commercial projects is strictly prohibited.

Any team identified as having submitted plagiarized material or misattributed third-party work will be immediately disqualified with all awards revoked.

Student teams retain 100% full intellectual property ownership of all concepts, source code, designs, algorithms, and project assets developed for Pragati 2026.

Neither the Algorand Blockchain Club nor Academy of Technology claims any equity, patent rights, or ownership over student solutions.

By participating, teams grant the organizing committee a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to display project summaries, team photographs, and demo videos for non-commercial academic promotion, archival documentation, and annual event highlights.

The designated faculty coordinators and competition administrators hold sole and final authority to disqualify any team or individual participant found violating these Terms of Service or competition policies.

When a team is disqualified, all associated members are cascade-disqualified and immediately barred from creating new teams, joining other teams, or submitting proposals.

When an individual member is disqualified, they are removed from their team roster and barred from further participation. If the disqualified member was the Team Lead, leadership is automatically promoted to the earliest joined eligible teammate.

Submissions are evaluated against the official 7-criterion scoring framework: Problem Understanding (15%), Technical Architecture & Feasibility (20%), Algorand Blockchain Relevance (15%), Innovation & Uniqueness (15%), Implementation Roadmap (15%), Impact & Practicality (10%), and Clarity & Presentation (10%).

All scoring, milestone evaluations, shortlisting, and award selections made by the faculty evaluation committee and invited industry jury are final, binding, and non-negotiable.

The Pragati registration portal and APIs are provided on an 'as-is' and 'as-available' basis. While the organizers implement industry-standard security and operational hardening, the institution is not liable for temporary service interruptions, network latency during milestone submissions, or local hardware failures on participant devices.

Participants are advised to complete team formation and proposal submissions well ahead of posted countdown deadlines to avoid congestion.

These Terms of Service and all competition regulations are governed by the academic bylaws and disciplinary framework of Academy of Technology, affiliated with Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology (MAKAUT), West Bengal, India.

For any inquiries regarding these terms, please contact blockchainclub@aot.edu.in.