BENGALURU: India is one of the fastest growing developer communities on GitHub, with a 28% increase compared to last year, says the latest report by the developer platform. India is the second largest developer community on GitHub, having surpassed China in 2022. GitHub estimates that by 2028, India will surpass the US.
“India’s developers have gone a leap further: they’re increasingly using AI to build AI. India has the second-highest number of contributors to public generative AI projectsThis makes it ever more likely the next great AI multinational will be born on the continent,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke posted on X (formerly Twitter).
Prime Minister Narendra Modi responded to Dohmke with the post: “When it comes to innovation and technology, Indian youth are among the best!”
GitHub’s latest Octaverse report estimates there are 17 million coders from India on GitHub. Last year, the number was 13.2 million, and two years prior to that, in 2021, it was just 5.8 million.
Philippines and Kenya saw slightly higher rates of developer growth on the platform than India over the past year, but from much smaller bases.
India has the second-highest number of GitHub Education users, contributors to public generative AI projects, and contributions to open-source projects, the report said.
The increasing number of educational users of the platform has been attributed to the National Education Policy which requires school students to learn coding and AI.
GitHub is a platform that allows developers to collaborate on projects, store and share code, and track changes. It is the largest repository of open-source projects, which are software that developed and shared with the intention that anyone can use, modify, and redistribute it.
Open-source communities in India, the report said, are leveraging GitHub Copilot to build digital solutions, such as Open Healthcare Network (OHC), an open-source organization dedicated to enhancing healthcare delivery and management.
GitHub notes that the growth in the developer community outside the US started in 2013, but has accelerated over the last few years. Along with India, GitHub said, it has witnessed growth in Brazil and Nigeria, “as they are all densely populated countries.”
