Makeshift Miracles

Author: Sudip Talukdar
Publication: The Times of India
Date: January 1, 2004
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/398740.cms

Introduction: The Indian Genius for Jugaad

In the 1990s, the Narasimha Rao government took far-reaching initiatives to free the economy of stifling controls and paved the way for liberalisation and globalisation.
 
The reordered set-up enabled Indian skills and enterprise to leapfrog into universal prominence, in some of the most happening areas like software, information technology, electronics, etc.
 
Lately, global giants are lining up to start operations on Indian soil, involving mass relocation of jobs. The Guardian obliquely commented on how altered circumstances are compelling the British to plough back jobs 'plundered' from the subcontinent 200 years ago.
 
While a resurgent India is poised to become a global economic power in only a few decades from now, another success story, although older and perhaps as inspiring, has gone virtually unnoticed.
 
It is an India of jugaad, taken for granted, yet fulfilling a vital necessity at a resource-starved grassroots. The operative world of jugaad, implying alternatives, substitutes, improvisations and make-dos, is spurred by a native inventiveness steeped in a culture of scarcity and survival.
 
This mode of quick fixes has stood the test of time, demonstrating its viability in auto-repairs, earthworks, construction, fabrication, farm equipment, military hardware, among others, sustained by a pool of professionals, mechanics and workmen. Unknown to the public, jugaad supplemented the war effort in December 1971.
 
Negligible foreign exchange reserves foreclosed buying replacements for defective firing pins, in practically half of the T-54 and T-55 Russian-made tanks, deployed on the western border.
 
Senior military commanders took a calculated risk in assigning the operations branch of an infantry division to scout for a local alternative. A nondescript "rickety old Sikh", located in the Punjab interiors, agreed to fabricate one.
 
Over months of trials at his lathe workshop, the Sikh perfected a firing pin, based on a design that served both the models. His jugaad proved to be as good as the original.
 
He duplicated hundreds of them at a cost of Rs 27 each, against the Rs 300 for an imported one. The world gaped at the lightning Indian thrust into East Pakistan and the capture of Dhaka in only 14 days.
 
The success was underwritten by a "gigantic scale of wartime improvisation anywhere in the world, except perhaps for the Vietcong", as a military planner described it.
 
Working round the clock, Indian sappers rigged-up thousands of bridges with locally available bamboo, cane and jute, to move masses of men and materials promptly across fast-flowing streams and rivers, criss-crossing a terrain that was also swampy and densely vegetated, enough to bog down an army.
 
Similarly, topographical and logistical challenges stymied attempts to link the country's west coast for nearly a century. Even the British abandoned the project as impossible.
 
But Indian technocrats, buoyed by the winds of liberalisation, undertook and completed in only seven years, what has arguably been one of the world's toughest rail engineering projects, often with the help of improvisation and innovation.
 
The prevailing practice of hiring a huge labour force and a fleet of jeeps was discarded in favour of an alternative approach. Scores of fresh diploma-holders were tasked with mapping out an alignment on motorbikes, through a maze of mountains, jungles and valleys.
 
The mobile teams worked out the most cost-effective route, slashing distances by more than half and travel time as drastically.
 
However, innumerable problems beset the boring of twin tunnels in Goa , that could be surmounted only by lopping off nearly a third of their proposed length. As none of the known procedures worked, the engineers resorted to jugaad.
 
They raised the level of the alignment and accomplished the 'unthinkable'. Subsequently, the debris from the hollowed-out sections was utilised in maintaining the same elevation at the opposite end, further southwards, to prevent water-logging and track submergence.
 
The jugaad saved more than Rs 12 crore. In another instance, localised jugaad bailed out a team of scientists, after a sudden storm played spoilsport by tossing their boat far out into the Chilka lake in Orissa.
 
These experts, after concluding a sensitive assignment, would have been hopelessly stranded, but for the help rendered by a grass-cutter. He fashioned a raft of sorts, before their disbelieving eyes, by undoing his stack of hay and fastening it securely around a long stave.
 
He propelled the contraption across the choppy waters with a deft motion of his hands. He returned with the boat and ferried them across.
 
Visitors to Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh are intrigued by the presence of a contraption that looks like an unseemly marriage of a tractor-trolley- bullock cart with a sooty open bonnet.
 
As the design or the make does not match any known description or definition of a roadworthy vehicle, it lies outside the pale of transport laws. Neither registration nor licence is required to operate one.
 
In the eighties, mechanics in Punjab assembled a prototype to transport agriculture produce to godowns and rugged enough to negotiate uneven village tracks. They chose the ubiquitous water pump that consumed diesel by the hour, not miles, to run the contraption.
 
Gradually the idea caught on in western UP, where improved versions with closed bonnets and a steering were fabricated, with greater seating capacity. It is incidentally known as the Jugaad.
 

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