You've seen the problem.
Now — what will you become?
Most people will tell you the same few things to be — doctor, engineer, “something with computers.” But here's a secret the marks sheets don't show you: a country is really just a big list of problems waiting for someone to solve them, and India's biggest ones are still wide open. The things it can't yet make, can't yet build — those are called sunrise sectors: brand-new fields the country needs so badly it will be looking for people to fill them long after you've grown up. Every gap on this site is a problem. And behind every problem is a person who fixes it. Why not you?
Sunset fields vs. sunrise fields
The paths everyone rushes toward because they sound safe. So many people head there that it's elbow-to-elbow by the time you arrive — you end up as one face in a huge crowd, all chasing the same door.
The new frontiers India is racing to build — making its own chips, its own batteries, its own clean energy. Hardly anyone knows how to do these yet, so if you learn, the country will need you for your whole life. Not a crowd. A wide-open field with your name on it.
The whole self-reliance ledger is, read another way, a map of India's sunrise sectors. Each gap the country is racing to close is a field crying out for the next generation to fill it.
The gap → the person who closes it
Each card is one of India's real dependencies, and the kinds of person the country needs to close it. Not job ads — directions. Tap through to the full deep-dive, with the figures and the sources, whenever one pulls you in.
Almost every chip inside an Indian-made phone is still imported.
India is building its first real fabs now. The people who can run and design them barely exist yet — the shortage lasts a generation.
- Electronics & VLSI engineer
- Semiconductor process / materials engineer
- Applied physicist
- Chip-design (fabless) engineer
The lithium, cobalt and rare earths behind every battery and motor are almost fully imported.
India has the ore but not the refineries. Building the midstream China controls is a wide-open, high-value field.
- Metallurgical engineer
- Materials scientist
- Mining & geological engineer
- Hydrometallurgy / process chemist
Nearly nine of every ten barrels of oil India burns arrive by ship.
The exit — solar cells, batteries, green hydrogen — has to be built and made in India, not just installed. That's decades of work.
- Electrochemical / battery engineer
- Power & electrical engineer
- Chemical engineer (electrolysers, fuels)
- Photovoltaics / materials scientist
India is the world's #2 arms buyer — and still can't make its own jet engine.
The country is turning maker fast. The hardest pieces — engines, seekers, superalloys — are exactly where skilled Indians are missing.
- Aerospace / mechanical engineer
- Metallurgist (superalloys, hot-section)
- Radar & defence-electronics engineer
- Control & guidance systems engineer
India makes the world's medicines — from raw ingredients it imports, mostly from China.
Reviving the fermentation and fine-chemistry India let lapse is a strategic, high-moat field with almost no bench of young talent.
- Biochemical / fermentation engineer
- Industrial microbiologist
- Medicinal / process chemist
- Pharmacologist or nutrition scientist
India feeds itself and the world — but imports most of its cooking oil, fertiliser and many seeds.
The gaps are specific and solvable: oilseeds, potash alternatives, cold chain, home-bred seeds — food science with a clear national target.
- Agricultural scientist / agronomist
- Plant breeder / geneticist
- Food technologist
- Chemical engineer (fertiliser)
India has the water nationally, but wastes most of it and reuses little.
Recycling, precision irrigation and affordable purification are engineering problems India must solve on its own soil.
- Environmental / water engineer
- Hydrologist
- Agricultural / irrigation engineer
- Membrane & purification technologist
The one thing no one can sell India — yet polluted across much of it.
Stubble, indoor smoke and thin monitoring are all buildable problems: fuels, clean stoves, home-grown sensors.
- Environmental engineer
- Atmospheric / combustion scientist
- Mechanical engineer (clean fuels, stoves)
- Sensor & data engineer
India weaves the world's cloth — on looms and machines it still imports.
Moving up from cloth to the machinery and advanced fibres is where the value, and the gap, now sits.
- Textile engineer
- Mechanical engineer (machinery)
- Polymer / fibre scientist
India builds its own homes — but leans on imported coking coal for steel and lacks real shelters.
Low-carbon cement, engineered bamboo and safe, resilient housing are open frontiers for the people who design what a country is built from.
- Civil & structural engineer
- Materials scientist (cement, binders)
- Architect / urban planner
If the worst came, India's people have almost no shelters and only days of fuel in reserve.
Readiness — shelters, warning networks, reserves, resilient comms — is a field India has barely staffed and urgently needs.
- Civil / structural engineer (shelters)
- Logistics & supply-chain engineer
- Communications / electronics engineer
- Disaster-management / public-policy specialist
The same map, three different first steps
A 14-year-old and a final-year student need different things from the same page. Curiosity, then direction, then a first real move. Find your row.
In school
Grades 6–12You don't need to pick a career yet. Just get curious about one real problem.
Choose a single sunrise sector above and read its story. You don't have to understand everything — just find the one that makes you go "wait, really?"
This whole site is a treasure box for projects — follow where an everyday brand's money really goes, or draw a map of what India has to buy from other countries, and why.
Every problem here hides inside a subject you already study — chemistry, physics, biology, geography. The one that stops feeling like homework? That's a clue worth keeping.
Got an Atal Tinkering Lab, a science fair or a robotics club? Point your next build at a gap on this page. Even a small model of a big idea counts.
In college
UndergraduatePoint your degree — and your first project — at a sunrise sector.
The fields above will be short of skilled people for decades. That's where a fresh graduate is scarce, valued and needed.
The Companies India Needs Built page is a free, validated list of real ventures — perfect for a startup-competition pitch or a first prototype.
Take one concrete gap into your college e-cell, hackathon or incubator. A problem the country actually has beats another food-delivery app.
Final-year & beyond
Graduating · PGTurn a national dependency into a thesis, an interview edge, or a company.
Topics like reducing India's reliance on imported APIs, or refining rare earths at home, are ripe for deep, citable research.
Understanding a company's supply-chain exposure and where local sourcing wins makes you the rare candidate who sees the whole board.
If a gap has become your obsession, the founders already building are on the wall — and the pledge form is one click away.
The generation that finds these solutions isn't coming later. It's in school right now.
Every gap on this site is waiting for someone to close it. It could be you.