On 7th January 2018, amidst the beautiful sands and winds of Malpe Beach, Manipal the grand finale of 15th edition of Quiz on the beach® (QoTB®) powered by MRF and hosted by T. A. Pai Management Institute was held. Mr. Sankha Das and Mr. Madhusudhan Rhenius (TAPMI Alumnus-batch of 1995) from MRF graced the occasion with their presence. It was a one of a kind experience for the participants with the cool sea breeze soothing their minds as they battled it out in India’s most popular quizzing event. The audience were equally thrilled as they got to witness some exciting and nail-biting rounds.

This year, the city qualifiers in India saw an addition of two more cities, Pune and Lucknow, making it 10 Indian cities and two international qualifiers at Dubai and Singapore. An online qualifier was conducted to provide an opportunity for contestants from remote locations to participate and be a part of QoTB® 2018. 3000+ teams with students from more than 500 institutions across the three countries participated in the qualifiers. The top 26 teams arrived in Manipal to fight it out and win the coveted TAPMI QoTB® Champions title. The top two international teams – SIM Singapore and Murdock University Dubai headed directly to the grand finale.

Three nerve-racking rounds of semi -finals were conducted among 24 teams to decide the finalists of the grand event. The participants battled out hard for a position in the finals and for the first time, the QoTB® finale witnessed teams from Goa, Bhubaneshwar and Vadodara. The top 8 teams consisted of participants from IIM-Lucknow, NUS Singapore, CET Bhubaneshwar, PES University-Bengaluru, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, NIT Goa, SIM Singapore and Murdock University, Dubai.

The Quizmaster Mr. Giri Balasubramaniam of the TATA Crucible fame, conducted the quiz in an enthralling manner. In this fierce battle of wit, intelligence and stressful tie-breaker rounds, the defending champions from National University of Singapore (Shivam Bhardwaj and Mudit Kedia) proved their mettle yet again by securing the first position, to take home a cash prize of Rs. 6 Lakhs. The team from CET Bhubaneshwar (Kumar Sailesh Mishra and SohanPrasad Sahoo) finished closely as the runners up, winning a cash prize of Rs. 3 Lakhs. The team from IIM-Lucknow (Abhijeet Singh and Akshath) who stood third, were awarded with a cash prize of Rs. 1 lakh. Mr. Sankha Das from MRF commended TAPMI for putting together the event in such a grand manner and described that QoTB was a unique and thrilling experience for him and the company as a whole. Mr.Madhusudhan expressed his pride of being an alumnus of TAPMI and praised the institution for bringing talents across nations.

The national media channel, ETNow recorded the event and it will be telecasted nationally.