Become a Political Scientist.

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.

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.

Senior: ₹45.0L

Design Researchers generate the qualitative insight that product and design teams use to make decisions. The core work is planning and executing in-depth interviews, contextual inquiries, diary studies, and ethnographic field visits — then synthesising raw transcripts and field notes into actionable findings through affinity mapping, journey mapping, and atomic research repositories. In India, the role lives across product companies (Razorpay, Swiggy, Phonepe, Meesho), FAANG-India research teams (Microsoft Research India, Google UX Research, Meta), design consultancies (Idiom, Onio Design, Lollypop, ThinkDesign), and social/Bharat-context research studios (Quicksand, Final Mile, D-Lab India) where rural ethnography and vernacular fieldwork demand depth that survey analytics cannot reach. Entry paths come from psychology, sociology, anthropology, HCI, and industrial design — the degree is less important than a demonstrated ability to recruit, probe, and synthesise under ambiguity.

Senior: N/A

Regional language translators in India work across the 22 Sahitya Akademi-recognised scheduled languages, with the busiest corridors being Tamil ↔ English, Telugu ↔ English, Bengali ↔ English, Marathi ↔ English, and Malayalam ↔ English. The work spans literary translation (novels, short stories, poetry collections, non-fiction) for publishers like Westland, Eka, Roli, Manjul, and Penguin India; OTT subtitling and dubbing for Hotstar, Aha, Sun NXT, and Netflix India; government and legal document translation for ministries, courts, and PSUs; and academic/technical translation for universities and NGOs. High-profile recognition comes through the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize, the JCB Prize for Literature (which shortlists translated works — Daisy Rockwell's 'Tomb of Sand' and Banu Mushtaq's 'Heart Lamp' are recent Booker-shortlisted benchmarks), and the Crossword Book Award. Entry paths: M.A. in the source regional language plus strong English writing; freelance rates run ₹2-4 per word, with literary translators at established publishers earning ₹6-14L per year at mid-level, and senior literary translators with multiple award nominations reaching ₹20-50L through advances, grants, and residencies.

Senior: N/A

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

Linguists in India work across two converging tracks: academic research at institutions like CIIL Mysuru, JNU's Centre for Linguistics (CLLD), and IIT Bombay's CFILT — studying phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse in India's 22 scheduled languages and hundreds of dialects — and applied NLP industry roles at Google India, Microsoft Research India, AI4Bharat (IIT Madras), and Sarvam AI, building Indic language corpora, ASR/TTS pipelines, POS taggers, and dependency parsers. The IIIT Hyderabad Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC) and BPCC (Bharat Parallel Corpus Collection) are key touchpoints for low-resource machine translation. Entry typically requires M.A. Linguistics from JNU, EFLU Hyderabad, or Pune University; computational roles increasingly demand programming fluency (Python, NLTK, spaCy, Hugging Face Transformers) alongside formal linguistics training. The BHASHINI national language mission and government-funded AI4Bharat grants have created a pipeline of NLP engineer and language data scientist roles that did not exist before 2020.

Senior: N/A