http://suvratk.blogspot.com/2010/02/india-facing-shortage-of-geologists.html (..I'm amazed by the small#of300..)

"We need some 300 geologists a year, but the availability is less than 100," said Ms Shantha Sheela Nair, Secretary, Ministry of Mines. The Ministry is investing heavily in training programmes to upgrade the skills of existing manpower..."We need educational institutions to produce geologists even to meet the current demand," Ms Nair said adding Indian geologists are in huge demand the world over.... "Several universities have even withdrawn the post-graduate courses for lack of demand," he said..."

"The article suggests that it is the growing preference for IT courses that is responsible for this shortage.
That does play a role....but there is nothing new about the career preferences of Indian students. As long as I remember geology was not the hot subject to major in. The best and the brightest have always preferred either engineering or computer sciences or medicine or MBA to geology.."

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The reason is quite simple, particularly b4 the advent of remote sensing and digitalised mapping(gravitational,EM,seismic/sonic...), geologists often need to do much field work and the brahmins usually avoid getting their hands dirty...life for junior geologists would be tuff...so they opt for getting call centre work in air-cond office....

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During the early decades of the PRC, becoming a geologist was consided a patriotic act; a number of  top chinese leaders were geology students or geologists; guess who? how about Zhou En-lai (@U of Gottingen), Wen Jiabao(his pic below) and Li Siquang, who discovered the Daqing oil field, had become a national hero