Did you know that a recent study conducted on the calculation of annual salaries of data scientists, both in India and abroad, came up with the most astounding results? If this study and its calculations are to be believed then the Indian Data Scientists literally make 1/10^th of the annual salary that is earned by Non-Indian Data Scientists. With the field of data science growing so very rapidly on a daily basis, it makes one wonder as to what situation or circumstances may have resulted in such a scenario coming into the picture.

According to the various participants and their data, it was concluded that the median Indian salary of any data science professional is close to $11,715 which is equal to INR 7.5 lakhs. This is quite lower than the average global salary which stands at $55,441 and there seems to be almost a feeble comparison to the kind of salary earned by US data science professionals which is close to $110,000, which makes the Indian salary literally close to peanuts. This study was decided upon by deriving entries from respondents belonging to close to 52 countries.

Another survey was conducted by Kaggle, which is supposed to be the world’s largest global online community, made up of various data scientists, statisticians, data engineers, machine engineers and so on. It published this survey under the name of ‘The State of Data Science and Machine Learning Annual Survey’ and it supposedly derived insights from the odd 16,000 respondents who participated in the same. It is a platform owned by Google and is supposed to boast of over a million members and is known to attract the world’s smartest data scientists by holding online competitions and hackathons and the like.

But why is it that the Indian scenario has such great gaps in the payscale. Let us let Shantanu Bhattacharya, a prominent Indian data scientist explain. He says “Primarily the proliferation of the term data scientist in India, which has become a catch all phrase for anyone working with data.” The problem with Indian educational institutes lies in the fact that they train individuals from non-mathematics and non-statistical background as a part of the IT service shops of the same. There is no knowledge given regarding the underlying business nor is there any knowledge given in terms of the statistical modules, this thus leads to a lot of bad results on both the part of the companies and their employees.

Another major problem in India is the fact that candidates don’t really have the proper kind of skill set which will help them work really efficiently within the industry. This is why it has become quite a problem because companies have begun seeking for those individual professionals who actually know how to work well in the industry. Thus there is a pressing need for more such institutes like Imarticus Learning, which is essentially a professional training institute and the can train individuals in keeping with the industry standards.