Jugaad: The Indian Habit of Solving It With What's in the Room

Jugaad is a colloquial Hindi and Urdu word for an improvised fix — the clever workaround assembled from whatever was available. In India it is used for everything from a taped-together repair to a genuinely inventive piece of engineering. Around 2012 it also became a management theory, which is where it started causing arguments.

Six ideas worth taking from it.

1. The word originally described a vehicle. In Punjabi, jugaad referred to makeshift transport built in rural workshops — a diesel irrigation pump bolted onto a cart frame, steering improvised, no factory involved. It moved people and goods for a fraction of the cost of a truck. That image is the concept in miniature: not a cheaper version of the real thing, but a different thing assembled from parts that were already lying around doing something else.

2. It inverts the usual order of design. Conventional product development defines the ideal specification, then strips features until the cost works. Jugaad begins at the constraint. After the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, the potter Mansukhbhai Prajapati built a refrigerator out of terracotta that uses no electricity at all — water seeps through porous clay walls and evaporates, cooling what's inside. It keeps vegetables fresh for several days and costs a fraction of any electric model. It is not a budget fridge. It is a different answer to the question a fridge was asked.

3. Large companies have copied the method deliberately. When GE Healthcare set out to build an ECG machine for rural India, the team did not shrink a hospital unit. They rebuilt around the constraint: four buttons instead of a dozen, battery power, and — the detail everyone remembers — a small printer originally designed for bus tickets, repurposed rather than engineered from scratch. The resulting MAC 400 sold at roughly $800 against about $2,000 for a conventional machine, and brought the cost of a single scan down to around a dollar. Versions of it later sold outside India too.

4. The book turned it into six rules. Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu and Simone Ahuja's 2012 Jugaad Innovation set out six principles: seek opportunity in adversity, do more with less, think and act flexibly, keep it simple, include the margin, and follow your heart. "Include the margin" is the one that tends to get skipped in Western retellings — it means designing for the people usually treated as an unprofitable edge case, on the theory that they are where the real constraint lives.

5. Indian critics are considerably harder on it than Western business writers. This matters, because the flattering version is the one that travels. The domestic critique is that jugaad has become a cover story for deferred maintenance, unsafe improvisation, bypassed regulation and a tolerated low bar on quality — that a country celebrated for workarounds risks never building the systems that make workarounds unnecessary. Both readings are fair. The same instinct produces the clay refrigerator and the electrical repair that catches fire.

6. The difference is whether the fix is allowed to become permanent. That is the practical test, and it survives translation. A jugaad solution that buys time while a proper one is built is resourcefulness. The identical solution, still in place two years later because it mostly works, is decay. Nothing about the fix itself tells you which one you have — only whether anyone wrote down a date to replace it.

Jugaad's reputation abroad is as a philosophy of cheapness, which is a misreading. It is a philosophy about sequence — that starting from the constraint produces different answers than starting from the ideal and trimming. Sometimes worse ones. Occasionally a fridge that runs on evaporation.