Bengaluru, Mar 14 (IANS): In a bid to recognise the contribution of developers in the open source community, Information Technology (IT) major IBM, in collaboration with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Nasscom, on Thursday announced a new multi-year programme called "India Developer Champions".

The programme aims to create a single, unified platform to acknowledge outstanding developer work in open source.

"IBM wants to put a spotlight on the 23 million developers and data scientists in the world who work across industries and who, through their creativity and skill, are making a real difference to society," Bob Lord, Senior Vice President, Cognitive Applications and Developer Ecosystems, IBM, said in a statement.

"The IBM Developer Champions programme would help shine a light on the significant contributions coming from open source developers in India -- a massively important market."

The multi-year programme would promote open technology initiatives and highlight the importance of India's growing developer ecosystem.

"India's software and technology industry has scaled great heights and we have the fastest growing concentration of software developers in the world. The 'Software Product Policy 2019' would further boost the demand for developers and India as a software product power can create 3.5 million jobs by 2025," said IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.

The US-based IT major also has a "Girls of Code" programme under which it would partner with state governments to prepare over 200,000 girls and women in government schools over the next three years for "new collar" jobs.