The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the University Grants Commission (UGC) are coming together to conduct a national-level crossword contest for college students between March and August this year. The three-stage event will be called the National Inter-College Crossword Contest 2022 and will be organised in a hybrid online-offline mode. 

Some of the known benefits of crossword solving include improving logical reasoning, stimulating problem-solving attitude, inculcating decision making skills and much more. It will also be in alignment with the National Education Policy 2020, which seeks to promote a holistic education system in a multidisciplinary way among students.
 
The contest will have a Student/Institutional Round that will be online, five offline Zonal Rounds for North, South, West, East and Northeast; and an offline National Round in New Delhi. The first round will be open to all students from colleges and institutes to play individually. It will involve solving crossword clues online for four successive Sundays starting April 3, 2022. After the fourth Sunday round on April 24, 2022, the top two participants from each institute will form the institutions’ teams for the offline rounds. A practice round will be held on April 2, 2022 to familiarise the participants to the contest format.    

All interested students will need to register on nice.crypticsingh.com/. The registration is free of cost and has already begun.