GitHub India: Celebrating a community connected by code

A year ago, we were celebrating the launch of GitHub India to serve the third largest developer community on GitHub. Today, I am thrilled to welcome GitHub Satellite to India and introduce new programs to empower India’s rich community of developers, startups and students. We will also celebrate the achievements of India’s thriving developer community over the past year.

Open source powers India’s innovation

India has become an innovation powerhouse, with open source software development at the core. The growth in activity and engagement shows how powerful and invested India’s software development has become. Indian developers are truly building the future of software! Over the past year, we have seen over 1.8 million developers join GitHub in India, with the community now totaling 5.8 million developers, and growing.

*Over the past year

The number of contributions on the platform, such as issues and team discussions increased by 75 percent in India compared to about 40 percent for the rest of the world over the past year.
 In public repos, the number of contributors increased by 80 percent over the previous year. In fact, over 1 million developers created their first repository on GitHub in India, making it the fastest growing country in the world, in terms of developers contributing to open source. So it is no shock that we are predicting that more than 10 million developers from India will call GitHub home by 2023. It is so exciting to think about what all of these new developers will create!

GitHub Enterprise accelerates digital transformation

What’s even more impressive is that we are seeing the same level of engagement and growth across enterprises embracing open source. The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation and urged companies to adopt more flexible ways of working to continue to innovate and remain relevant. In less than a year, the adoption of GitHub Enterprise by businesses based in India has tripled. Companies such as Infosys, InMobi, Cognizant, Udaan, ShareChat, Capillary Technologies, Swiggy, ArisGlobal and many others have chosen GitHub to collaborate and build the software that powers their businesses, accelerating digital transformation, no matter where their developers are based. In addition, our partners – Amrut Software, Canarys Automations, CXIO Technologies, DevTools, Embee Software, G7CR Technologies and Sonata Software – are helping customers across India embrace an agile, secure and collaborative software development culture.

It is such a privilege to be part of this incredible innovation journey, empowering the developer community and businesses in India to build the technology that is driving the nation’s growth.

As we continue to accelerate our India’s developer community, we are introducing three new programs for India: GitHub Open Source Grants, GitHub Externships, and GitHub Accelerate.

GitHub Open Source Grants: supporting the open source community

Developers from India have created Open Source projects that have been forked tens of thousands of times and have had contributions from thousands across the globe. These projects are born and bred by passionate developers across the GitHub community, whose code and collaboration improves projects that so many of us depend on.

To support and fund open source maintainers and contributors in their important work, we are launching the GitHub Open Source Grants for India. As they continue to build open source software and make an impact for India and the world, GitHub will offer grants for a total sum of 1 Crore (10 million) Indian Rupees. By offering these grants, we want to celebrate and support the extremely valuable open source projects that are driving innovation across India, and raise awareness of this important work to attract more software contributions from the developer community across the world.

To find out more, please visit https://github.co/india-os-grants.

GitHub Externships: shaping the next generation of developers

India is home to one of the largest communities of student developers in the world. In 2020 we saw the number of students participating in the GitHub Campus program increase by 142 percent, over 100,000 students signed up to our GitHub Student Developer Pack and our campus offering was adopted by more than 100 higher-education institutions in India.

This growth is great to see, as the student ecosystem is incredibly important to the continued growth and pace of innovation in India. To support this growing community of student developers, today we’re launching GitHub Externships. This builds on GitHub’s Campus offering by providing students a unique opportunity to engage with companies in India, via fellowship programs, and build the right skills future developers need, to succeed in an enterprise environment. The program really connects the dots between open source, the next generation of software developers, and successful companies.

To find out more, please visit https://github.co/india-externship.

GitHub Accelerate: equipping startups to compete with the best

India has a vibrant tech startup community, with many entrepreneurs choosing GitHub to enable innovation. Last yearin partnership with a few leading venture partners in India, we ran a pilot program to provide access to GitHub Enterprise to startups in India. The program has seen outstanding engagement, with nearly 200 startups signing up, including AirMeet, Kawa Space, and ClearQuote, to name a few.

As a next step, we are thrilled to announce we are extending our GitHub Accelerate Program to startup accelerators, incubators and more venture partners in India, expanding the eligibility of the program to more than 1,000 new startups in the coming year. As GitHub Accelerate grows, we predict that the number of developers contributing to open source projects in India will reach record levels over the next few years.

To find out more, please visit https://github.co/india-accelerate.

Partnering with NASSCOM FutureSkills

As we introduce these programs today to further accelerate, empower and serve our developer community and ecosystem in India, I am excited to also announce our partnership with the NASSCOM FutureSkills program. GitHub will extend our GitHub Campus Program and Student Developer Pack to students, educators and institutes that are a part of NASSCOM’s university initiatives. Startups participating in NASSCOM’s incubator programs will also be able to access our GitHub Accelerate program.

NASSCOM is the premier trade body and chamber of commerce of the tech industry in India. The NASSCOM FutureSkills program aims at reskilling and upskilling two million professionals from the current IT workforce, and training another two million coming out of universities and other industry sectors across the country. We’re honoured to be part of this ambitious vision. The more we can all do to equip the developers, innovators, and solution builders of tomorrow, the brighter our future will look.

I am truly amazed and inspired by the infectious energy from students, startups, developers and enterprises in India. India is uniquely positioned to continue to drive innovation that accelerates human progress; and we at GitHub in India are humbled to serve and celebrate this ‘Community Connected by Code’!

Stay up to date

Join us today and tomorrow at GitHub Satellite India, for two days dedicated to celebrating India’s developer community. Learn about the latest GitHub updates in India by following @GitHubIndia on Twitter and following our GitHub repo. If you’d like to join our growing team in India, check out our open positions.

Written by

Maneesh Sharma

@msupernaut