Despite the growth, GitHub has deferred its predictions that India will surpass the US to become the world’s largest developer community by 2028 from earlier forecast of 2027. This shift, the company says, is based on “linear population growth”.
“India is the second largest developer community contributing to public generative AI (artificial intelligence) projects on GitHub, just behind the US, with a 79% increase from last year. India also saw a 95% year-over-year (YoY) growth in contributions to these projects, placing third globally, after the US and Hong Kong,” the company announced at its tenth annual developer conference GitHub Universe ’24 on Tuesday.
Until February this year, about 13.2 million Indian developers were using GitHub compared to around 20 million in the US.
“India’s booming developer community is using AI to build AI in record numbers, making it evermore likely that the next great multinational will come from India,” said GitHub chief executive Thomas Dohmke.
Globally, GitHub aspires to have one billion developers on its platform from the current over 100 million globally.
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Addressing the media, Dohmke said, “Our aspiration is to achieve that goal in the next decade. Maybe even sooner maybe by 2030.” He further foresees children as young as first graders using a mobile phones would also learn to code to create software on their devices, akin to a skill like math, science and social studies.To enable building micro applications, GitHub also introduced GitHub Spark, an AI-native tool to build personal, customised, and fully functional web apps entirely in natural language. These can integrate AI features and external data sources without requiring any management of cloud resources.
During the keynote, Dohmke said the firm is bringing developer choice to GitHub Copilot by making it multi-model, enabling developers to select from industry-leading models including Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, o1-preview and o1-mini.
In September this year at the ET World Leaders Forum, Dohmke said that India will overtake the US as home to the largest software developer community in the world by 2027, converging with the rise of AI. He said the that tens of millions of developers in India are creating the digital public infrastructure of the future, fuelling economic growth.
GitHub is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code. The company was acquired by technology giant Microsoft in 2018.
Releasing its 2024 edition of its Octoverse report in the US, GitHub said it has seen a surge in GenAI activity in India, signalling that AI has moved beyond the hype of 2023 as Indian developers.
“Our latest Octoverse report affirms that India’s developer community is the fastest growing developer population on the planet. India’s rise as a global tech titan is now inexorable,” Dohmke added.
The report highlights that developers in India are the second highest contributor to open source projects on GitHub. This is also shaping the future of software and directly influencing innovation on a global scale.
India also has the second-highest number of GitHub Education users, contributors to public GenAI projects, and contributions to open source projects—underscoring India’s rise as a global technology leader, the company said during the announcement.
The report also pointed out that the rise in Education users is driven in part by the National Education Policy of 2020, which requires schools to include coding and AI in their curriculum. It goes on to say that a recent study from the learning platform Udemy found that GitHub is one of the most sought-after skills in India, comparable to English grammar.
“By investing in early-age software development and AI literacy, India is creating a sustained wave of developer talent, driving ongoing growth and securing its position as a global technology leader long-term,” GitHub added.
