Become a Geologist.

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.

Academic economists in India produce peer-reviewed research on development economics, labour markets, public finance, agricultural economics, and macro-finance, then publish in AER, ECTA, QJE, JPE, and the Indian Economic Review. The entry path is a PhD from MIT, Harvard, LSE, Princeton, Yale, DSE, ISI Kolkata/Delhi/Bengaluru, or Ashoka University, followed by a job-market paper strong enough to place at a research-active Indian institution or an international university. Day-to-day work alternates between running microeconometric analyses on IHDS, NSSO, ICRISAT VDSA, ASI, and ASER datasets; designing and overseeing RCT field experiments through J-PAL India, IFMR Krea, and 3ie India; writing working papers for NCAER, NIPFP, NBER, and BREAD; teaching graduate courses; and writing SERB, INSPIRE, or Gates Foundation grant proposals. Senior positions include full professor at Ashoka, ISI Fellow, or Principal Economist at RBI DEPR, NCAER, or NIPFP, with crossover opportunities at IMF, World Bank, and ADB.

Ruby on Rails Developers build and maintain full-stack web applications using Rails 7+ conventions — writing ActiveRecord models with scoped queries, designing RESTful and GraphQL APIs, offloading async work via Sidekiq + Redis, and wiring Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus) for real-time UI without writing JavaScript-heavy frontends. In India, Rails is a niche stack dominated by specialist consultancies (Vinsol, BigBinary, Codemancers, Josh Software) and early stacks at companies like Razorpay, CoinSwitch, and Instamojo, plus a strong pipeline of Shopify-adjacent and global SaaS remote roles that pay dollar salaries to Bengaluru- and Pune-based engineers. Rails' convention-over-configuration philosophy means a small team can ship a production-grade SaaS in weeks, making it the go-to for Shopify app developers, US-bootstrapped SaaS founders, and agencies serving the global market. The scarcity of Indian Rails developers — fewer than 5,000 with production experience — creates a pay premium of 20-35% over equivalent Django or Node.js roles at the same seniority.

Senior: ₹65.0L

Data Engineers build and operate the pipelines that move data from source systems (apps, payments, clickstreams, logs) into warehouses and lakehouses where analysts and ML teams can use it. The day-to-day work spans designing schemas, writing batch and streaming ETL jobs, owning Airflow/Dagster DAGs, tuning Spark or dbt models, monitoring pipeline freshness and cost, and partnering with analysts and data scientists who depend on the data being correct, fresh, and explainable. In India, the role is heavily concentrated at product unicorns (Flipkart, Razorpay, Swiggy, Zomato, PhonePe, Cred), fintech and BFSI players (HDFC, Kotak, ICICI), and the GCCs of global firms (Walmart Global Tech, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Microsoft) — all of whom run terabyte-to-petabyte-scale warehouses on Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or Databricks.

Senior: ₹60.0L

iOS Developers (Swift) build, profile, and ship native iPhone and iPad apps using Swift, SwiftUI, and UIKit — serving India's premium 4-5% iOS user base that drives outsized ARPU at consumer-app companies like CRED, Zomato, PhonePe, Swiggy, Razorpay, Dream11, MakeMyTrip, and Cleartrip. Day-to-day work spans SwiftUI screen authoring, Swift Concurrency (async/await, actors, structured tasks), Combine reactive pipelines, Core Data and SwiftData persistence, Instruments profiling, TestFlight distribution, and App Store submission via App Store Connect. India's native-iOS supply is chronically thinner than Android or Flutter, making senior Swift engineers among the highest-paid mobile specialists in the country — with a 15-30% scarcity premium over equivalent Android roles at top product unicorns.

Senior: ₹65.0L

Kotlin Android Developers build the native apps that run on 95%+ of Indian smartphones — from UPI-payments flows at PhonePe and Paytm, to short-video feeds at MX Player and ShareChat, to streaming interfaces at Hotstar, to hyperlocal discovery at Flipkart Quick. The role demands Jetpack Compose UI, Kotlin Coroutines and Flow for async data, Room or SQLDelight for offline persistence, Retrofit + OkHttp for API contracts, and Hilt/Dagger 2 for dependency injection. India is the world's second-largest Android market by volume; nearly every consumer-internet product company (Zomato, CRED, Meesho, Truecaller, Dream11, Razorpay) runs a dedicated Kotlin Android team, and the combination of massive user base with high traffic variance (festival sales, IPL, exam results) produces engineering challenges that top global roles rarely match.

Senior: ₹60.0L

Renewable Energy Engineers in India design, develop, and commission solar PV, wind, green hydrogen, and battery energy storage (BESS) projects that together form the 500 GW non-fossil capacity push mandated under India's Nationally Determined Contributions. Day-to-day the role ranges from PVsyst energy modeling and string-inverter vs. central-inverter trade-off studies, to wind mast data analysis in WAsP and electrolyser sizing for green H2 projects at SECI-allocated sites. Primary employers are independent power producers (ReNew Power, Adani Green Energy, Greenko, Tata Power Solar, Avaada, ACME, Azure Power), OEMs and EPC firms (Suzlon, Inox Wind, Siemens Gamesa India, Waaree, Vikram Solar), and government bodies (SECI, MNRE, IREDA, NTPC Renewable Energy Limited). Entry is through B.Tech in Electrical, Mechanical, or Energy Engineering; M.Tech in Renewable Energy Systems from IITs, NITs, TERI SAS, or BITS Pilani gives a meaningful head start into design-centre and R&D roles.

Senior: N/A