India's community on GitHub soars 28% to 17M developers

Over 17 million developers in India are building on GitHub, a developer platform powered by Microsoft Copilot. This represents a 28% growth in 2024, making the country one of the fastest-growing developer communities globally, said GitHub in a statement.

The US-based company also said India ranks second worldwide in GitHub Education users, contributors to public generative AI projects, and open-source contributions. 

GitHub Education is a portal that provides students and teachers with resources to learn and teach software development.

The company’s latest Octoverse report for 2024 reveals an uptick in generative AI activity in India, showing that AI has moved beyond the hype phase of 2023, with several developers and firms prioritising results over experimentation. 

"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. Not only this, but 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 CEO, Thomas Dohmke. 

Findings also reveal that India is emerging as the second-largest developer community contributing to public generative AI projects on GitHub, just behind the United States, up 79% from last year. Additionally, the country experienced a 95% year-over-year growth in contributions to these projects, securing the third spot globally behind the US and Hong Kong (SAR). 

The report indicates that India’s developer community is contributing to societal developments through open-source projects such as ERPNext, which has the highest number of contributions in the GitHub’s For Good First Issue category. It connects contributors with projects focused on addressing societal challenges and supporting sustainable development.

Furthermore, open-source communities in India are utilising GitHub Copilot, an AI-assisted coding tool, to develop digital solutions. An example is the Open Healthcare Network, an open-source organisation focused on improving healthcare delivery and management. 

The company has predicted that India will overtake the US to become the world’s largest developer community by 2028. 

GitHub also rolled out major updates to its Copilot-powered developer platform during its tenth annual developer conference, GitHub Universe ’24. 

The company revealed that Copilot is evolving into a multi-model platform, allowing developers to choose from leading AI models such as Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, o1-preview, and o1-mini, to provide developers with enhanced coding experiences. 

It also introduced GitHub Spark, an AI tool to build personal, customised, and fully functional web apps entirely in natural language. 

GitHub is a developer platform powered by Microsoft Copilot for building, scaling, and delivering secure software. The platform is used by over 100 million developers, including more than 90% of Fortune 100 companies. Currently, more than 77,000 organisations have adopted GitHub Copilot.