The German Optimizing Puzzle Championship will be held in March. It consists of 3 rounds of optimizers spread over 3 weeks.

URL: http://www.logic-masters.de/OM2010/seiten/start.php

But hardly anyone participates from India...at least I haven't seen more than 3-4 names over the last three years.

English translation for the site can be found at

http://www.logic-masters.de/OM2010/seiten/start.php?chlang=en

I think the poor participation levels are due to the lack of feedback/ discussion regarding such events.
One way I can suggest to improve participation is to discuss the approaches used to find solutions after the competition is over.

Another problem is that these problems are open ended, so you never know whether your solution is the optimal one.
Maybe participants could share their most optimal answer (only value not solution) so that it drives others with lower answers are driven to try for better.
This is a grey area and I am not sure whether this is allowed within the competition rules.

These are the problems which have personally driven me away from optimization challenges, and I have not participated in even one event.
But this time around I will make an honest effort to participate and do well.

I think they dont share the values midway...but they do tell how many "improvements/optimizations" were made in the last 24 hours at user level...which gives only a vague idea.

Tomorrow is the last day of submission of first round of puzzles and as of now there is only 1 entry from India :(
Will be submitting my solutions tomorrow.

Hope there will be a few more entries !!