Become an Economist (Academic).

Sociologists in India study how caste, religion, gender, class, and urbanisation shape social life — then turn that analysis into policy evidence, electoral insight, or academic knowledge. The workhorse institutions are Delhi School of Economics, JNU, TISS Mumbai, Jamia Millia Islamia, and IIPS Mumbai for academic tracks; CSDS-Lokniti and Pew Research India for public-opinion and election research; Sambodhi Research, IDinsight, and J-PAL South Asia for applied development work; and NSSO/MoSPI and NITI Aayog for government-commissioned social surveys. Day-to-day work oscillates between NSSO microdata cleaning in Stata, designing Focus Group Discussions in rural field sites, writing for EPW, and presenting regression tables to programme officers. Entry requires an M.A. Sociology; most academic and senior applied posts require a PhD or MPhil from a UGC-recognised department.

Archaeologists in India excavate, document, and interpret material remains — from Harappan urban centres at Rakhigarhi and Dholavira to medieval fort complexes under AMASR Act 1958 protection — to reconstruct the subcontinent's 5,000-year built and social history. Employment spans the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) under MoC, state directorates of archaeology, Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute (Pune), BHU's PGIAR, JNU's Centre for Historical Studies, Aga Khan Trust for Culture, INTACH, and private heritage consultancies working EIA heritage impact assessments. A working archaeologist simultaneously reads stratified deposits, identifies ceramic assemblages by period and ware type, applies GIS-based site mapping, and navigates ASI excavation licensing under the AMASR Act — skills that translate equally to monument conservation, museum curation, and urban-heritage planning in Indian smart-city projects.

Environmental Scientists in India conduct field sampling, laboratory analysis, and regulatory compliance work to monitor and mitigate environmental degradation under the MoEF&CC and CPCB/SPCB frameworks. The bulk of the job market sits in EIA consulting (ERM India, AECOM, Ramboll, Tata Consulting Engineers, IL&FS Environmental), CPCB and state SPCBs (MPCB, KSPCB, TNPCB, DPCC), and corporate ESG/EHS divisions of large industrials (RIL, Tata Sustainability Group, JSW, Adani, Vedanta). Day-to-day work cycles between Form-I/IA EIA report preparation per MoEF&CC OM 2017 norms, NAAQS-compliant ambient air monitoring, BOD/COD/TSS water quality sampling for consent-to-operate renewals, ETP/STP design-review sign-offs, EC (Environmental Clearance) application packaging, and BRSR Principle 6 data compilation for listed companies' annual reports. Entry is via M.Sc Environmental Science (Delhi University, Annamalai, BHU, Pune University), B.Tech Environmental Engineering (IIT Roorkee, NIT Trichy), or B.Sc (Life Sciences) + PG Diploma in Environmental Law/Management from NIMS, TERI School of Advanced Studies, or IIFM Bhopal.

Wildlife Biologists in India study animal populations, habitat use, and species interactions to inform conservation policy and management. Day-to-day work alternates between remote field camps — running camera-trap grids, line-transect surveys, and GPS-collar deployments in tiger reserves, marine national parks, and Himalayan landscapes — and office-based analysis using R, MARK/RPresence, and distance-sampling models. Institutional homes include WII Dehradun, NCBS Bangalore, ATREE Bangalore, BNHS Mumbai, and WTI; major employers are the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), state forest departments, and international NGOs such as WWF India and WCS India. Entry requires at minimum an M.Sc in Wildlife Science or Life Sciences; competitive research positions demand a PhD.

Demographers in India study population dynamics — fertility, mortality, migration, and urbanization — using microdata from the Census of India, NFHS (National Family Health Survey), SRS (Sample Registration System), and HMIS (Health Management Information System). The premier institutional home is IIPS Mumbai, which runs NFHS nationally and houses India's largest concentration of demographers; JNU's Centre for the Study of Regional Development (CSRD), UNFPA India, MoHFW, and the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner (RGI) round out the major employers. A demographer's core output is life tables, TFR estimates, IMR/MMR projections, and population forecasts that feed MoHFW policy, state health missions, and global agencies like WHO and UNFPA. Entry requires at minimum an M.A. or M.Sc. in Population Studies, Demography, or Statistics; the PhD is the terminal degree and the gate to full research independence at IIPS, JNU, or international roles with IUSSP-affiliated programs.

Seismologists in India work inside government labs and academia to locate earthquakes in real time, operate broadband seismic networks, and translate waveform data into hazard products that underpin NDMA zoning maps and dam-safety clearances. The three primary employers are the National Centre for Seismology (NCS, under MoES, New Delhi) which operates the 115-station BBSN and issues all official Mw bulletins; the Indian Institute of Geomagnetism (IIG, Mumbai/Alibag) for crustal studies and geomagnetic hazard; and CSIR-NGRI Hyderabad for applied seismics, reservoir-induced seismicity (Koyna reservoir), and hydrocarbon exploration tie-ins. IIT-Roorkee Earthquake Engineering Department (one of the world's oldest) is the dominant academic employer for seismic hazard, strong-motion networks (PESMOS), and PhD training. Entry requires at minimum M.Sc. or M.Tech. in Geophysics, Applied Geology, or Earthquake Engineering; NCS and CSIR-NGRI scientist posts mandatorily require a PhD or a PhD in progress at the time of interview.

College Professors in India teach undergraduate and post-graduate students, conduct research, mentor doctoral candidates, and shape the academic life of a university — split structurally across two systems. The government / aided system (Delhi University, JNU, IITs / IIMs / NITs / IISc / IIITs, central universities, IISERs, and state universities) recruits primarily through the UGC-NET (National Eligibility Test) plus institutional interviews, governed by UGC pay scales (currently the 7th CPC pay matrix at Academic Levels 10-15 plus Vice-Chancellor scale) and the 2018 UGC Regulations. The private system (Ashoka, OP Jindal Global, Krea, Plaksha, Shiv Nadar, FLAME, BITS, Bennett, Manipal, Symbiosis, Christ, SRM, VIT, Amity) recruits via direct institutional searches, often without the UGC-NET requirement for Assistant Professors, and pays significantly higher cash compensation at top-tier private liberal-arts and STEM-research universities. The role spans teaching (typically 6-12 hours per week of classroom teaching, much higher in undergraduate-heavy government colleges), research (publish in peer-reviewed journals, secure SERB / DST / DBT / ICSSR / Wellcome / private grants), doctoral and post-graduate supervision, departmental administration, and increasingly public engagement and policy-adjacent work. Best-fit for those who genuinely love a discipline deeply enough to spend a lifetime on it — and who can survive the 5-7 year PhD bottleneck before stable income.

Senior: ₹35.0L

Political scientists in India study electoral behaviour, constitutional structures, international relations, comparative politics, and public policy through systematic empirical and normative methods. The field's institutional anchors are JNU's Centre for Political Studies (CPS), CSDS-Lokniti's National Election Study (NES) waves, Ashoka University's Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD), and think tanks such as ORF, Carnegie India, and Brookings India. Day-to-day work spans survey-instrument design for Election Commission voter-behaviour studies, peer-reviewed publications in journals like Studies in Indian Politics (SAGE-CSDS), Economic and Political Weekly, India Review, and Asian Survey, policy briefs to MEA, MHA, and NITI Aayog, op-eds in The Hindu and Indian Express, and TV panels on NDTV and CNN News18 during election cycles. Entry is via M.A. Political Science (JNU, Hyderabad Central, Ashoka) leading to a Ph.D.; alternatively, a CSDS-Lokniti research fellowship bridges academic and applied polling work.

Senior: N/A

UX Researchers are the product team's evidence engine — they design and run the studies that answer 'why are users doing this?' and 'what should we build next?' The work is a disciplined mix of qualitative (in-depth interviews, think-aloud usability tests, diary studies) and quantitative (survey design, task-completion metrics, tree testing) methods, synthesised into opportunity-area frames and atomic research repositories that PM, design, and engineering teams consume to make better bets. In India's product economy, UX Researchers are embedded in FAANG-India teams (Google UX Research Bengaluru, Microsoft Research India Hyderabad), unicorns (Razorpay, Swiggy, PhonePe, CRED, Meesho), and mid-size product companies where the role often sits within a combined 'Product Design + Research' function. Unlike the broader Design Researcher role — which spans consultancy fieldwork, ethnographic studio work, and social-sector research — UXR is product-specific: every study connects to a product decision, a metric, or an OKR. Entry paths come from psychology, HCI, interaction design, and increasingly from B.Tech backgrounds with self-built research portfolios.

Senior: N/A

NLP Engineers build production language systems — Indic-language models, automatic speech recognition (ASR) and synthesis (TTS), document understanding for enterprise paperwork, IVR and voice-bot stacks for Indian customer support, named-entity recognition and information extraction, and the increasingly common multimodal pipelines that fuse text with vision and speech. The work blends applied research, production engineering, and dataset craft: you train and fine-tune transformer models for low-resource Indic languages, curate parallel corpora and labeled datasets, optimize inference for cost, debug failure modes that only show up in code-mixed Hindi-English speech or in handwritten Tamil documents, and own quality SLOs that mix accuracy, latency, and fairness across 22 official Indian languages. In India through 2026, NLP is one of the highest-impact applied-AI specializations because the global English-first NLP literature transfers poorly to Indic languages — concentrated demand sits at AI-native startups (Sarvam AI, Krutrim, Ola Krutrim, Yellow.ai), the public-good NLP groups at AI4Bharat (IIT-Madras) and Bhashini (Government of India), enterprise SaaS (Freshworks, Zoho ZIA, Postman, Verloop, Haptik), fintech (Razorpay, Cred, Paytm, M2P, IDfy), and the GCCs of Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and Amazon.

Senior: ₹75.0L

Design how digital products work — not just how they look. UX Designers conduct user research, build information architecture, sketch user flows, prototype interactions, and run usability tests to turn messy human problems into intuitive, evidence-backed product experiences. They sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and research, owning the journey from first user interview to final dev handoff. Distinct from UI designers (visual surface), product designers (broader strategic remit), and graphic designers (brand and marketing assets).

Senior: ₹55.0L