India is set to surpass the United States in terms of number of users on GitHub, an open source code sharing software platform for developers.
According to the annual report by Octoverse, Python for the first time replaced JavaScript as the most preferred language on the platform on the back of a surge in data science and machine learning, fields where Python is used the most.
India is expected to have the world’s largest developer population on GitHub by 2028, the report said. However, as of now, the US continues to have the most developers worldwide on the platform.
In 2024, there was a 59 per cent surge in the number of contributions to generative AI projects on GitHub and a 98 per cent increase in the number of projects overall.
Most of these contributions came from places like India, Germany, Japan, and Singapore, the report said.
The rise in Python usage is owed to a large number of people joining the open source community from across the STEM fields rather than the traditional community of software developers.
In 2024, developers around the world made more than 5.2 billion contributions to more than 518 million open source, public, and private projects, the report said.
According to the report, India had more than 17 million users on GitHub, ahead of BRICS partners China and Brazil, which had more than 9 million and 5.4 million users, in that order.
India also had a 95 per cent increase in year-over-year contributions to generative AI projects on GitHub – however, the overall number was way behind the US'.
The report predicted that the next wave of software development was poised to come from India.
"Behind only the United States in terms of developer population, India has the second-highest number of GitHub Education users, second-highest number of contributors to public generative AI projects on GitHub, and the second-highest number of contributions to open source projects.
"India’s growing developer community, equipped with AI tools, is poised to accelerate the region’s digital transformation and propel the nation as a global leader," it said.
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