Become a Volcanologist.

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.

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.

Senior: N/A

A full-stack builder who ships both the smart-contract layer (Solidity on EVM chains — Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base) and the dApp frontend that users actually touch (React / Next.js with wagmi / viem / ethers.js, WalletConnect, MetaMask). Unlike a pure protocol engineer who focuses on DeFi architecture and audit, a Web3 Developer owns the entire user-facing product: wallet connection flows, NFT minting UIs, on-chain data indexing via The Graph, IPFS / Arweave asset storage, and gas-cost UX. In India, the role is concentrated at crypto exchanges and product companies (CoinDCX, CoinSwitch, Biconomy, Push Protocol, Lens Protocol), Polygon's ecosystem of DApp and tooling teams, and a substantial remote-payroll layer where Indian developers invoice US / EU Web3 startups and DAOs directly in USDC or stablecoins. Entry requires fluency in both Solidity and a modern JS framework; senior roles demand end-to-end ownership from contract security to frontend performance.

Senior: N/A

Generative AI Engineers build and ship systems that produce images, text, audio, and video — integrating APIs like OpenAI's DALL-E 3, Stability AI's SDXL, and Anthropic's Claude into product features, running Stable Diffusion inference pipelines on AWS/GCP GPUs, fine-tuning ControlNet and LoRA adapters on proprietary datasets, and orchestrating multi-modal generation workflows with quality and safety guardrails. In India through 2026, the role is concentrated at image-tech companies (Glance, InMobi, Meesho's catalog team), conversational-AI startups (Yellow.ai, Haptik, Niki AI), design-automation tools (Adobe Firefly India team), and the GCCs of Microsoft, Adobe, and Nvidia — with a fast-growing fringe of Stable-Diffusion startups building for e-commerce product shots, ad-creative automation, and Indic-language content generation. The role sits between classical ML engineering and software engineering: you own the model pipelines and the API integrations that make generation reliable, fast, and cost-efficient at product scale — not the fundamental model research.

Senior: N/A

AI Engineers build production systems on top of large language models — RAG search, agents, fine-tuned models, prompt-orchestration pipelines, and the evals and guardrails that keep them reliable. The work sits between traditional software engineering and applied ML: you write Python services, design retrieval pipelines (vector search, BM25, rerankers), pick or fine-tune the right base model, write evals that quantify quality, and ship features against latency and cost SLOs. In India through 2026, the role is one of the fastest-growing technical hires — concentrated at fintechs (Razorpay, Cred, Paytm), SaaS companies (Freshworks, Zoho, Postman, Atlan, Hasura), AI-native startups (Sarvam AI, Krutrim, Ola Krutrim, Yellow.ai), and the GCCs of Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and Salesforce — and pays a clear premium over generalist backend roles.

Senior: ₹90.0L

Design, build, and audit smart contracts and the dApps that interact with them — Solidity on Ethereum / Polygon / Arbitrum, Rust on Solana, plus the Web3 frontend (Ethers.js, Wagmi, Viem) that connects wallets to those contracts. Day-to-day work mixes contract architecture, gas optimization, security review, oracle and bridge integration, and DevOps for indexers (The Graph) and node infra. In India, the role concentrates at crypto exchanges (CoinDCX, WazirX, CoinSwitch), Polygon and its Indian-founded portfolio of L2 / DeFi protocols, agency-style Web3 dev shops (QuillAudits, Code4rena auditors), and a heavy global-remote layer where Indian Solidity engineers work for US/EU DeFi protocols on contractor invoices. Pay is unusually decoupled from local market rates because most production work is open-source and globally hireable.

Senior: ₹80.0L