Making jugaad a global success

Jugaad is a quintessential Indian approach to life. When resources are limited, we learn to tackle problems by improvising solutions that are inexpensive and use whatever local materials are available. Jugaad is a term that is commonly used in north India, where everyone knows what the colloquial Hindi word means — a way to fix a difficulty not through conventional measures, but through the cheapest possible means. The concept, however, is ubiquitous throughout the country where adverity and the daunting cost of high technology have forced people to find ingenious solutions.

The origin of jugaad starts with the early years of an independent India, when it was short of everything possible but a keen desire to get ahead. In those years of struggle, farmers in remote areas of Punjab were desperately in need of mechanised transport. Since there was nothing cheap they could buy, they devised an improvised tractor by assembling a strange contraption. They mounted a diesel pump on the chassis of a trolley, attached wheels and a steering rod to it, and presto, a motor vehicle was born! It was called a jugaad. There was no patent on it—no one thought of such things then — so anyone who had the means copied this contraption, made their own "improvements" to it and made the jugaad a life-saver for many.

That example of grassroots innovation was repeated in many ways and in other systems, too, although it was most prevalent in the transport sector. And if you thought it was just the rural folk who opted for jugaad, you would be wrong. Over the years, even the well-off segment of society found—and still finds—
jugaad a convenient way to cut costs. If one’s foreign-made refrigerators or cars needed to be repaired, there was always a way to cut costs by cannibalising parts from somewhere else and retooling these. In short, it was a frugal way of innovation. “If necessity is the mother of invention then, dire necessity is the mother of jugaad,” says Virender Kapoor, author of Jugaad Attitude, a book that extols this concept. A solution that was initially created for a seemingly impossible situation, gradually “became an inspiration to find a common sense solution or the out of the box solution to every, problem, person, thing or a situation. It took on a meaning which was larger than life,” he writes. While such high praise may be warranted given the circumstances, India’s ubiquitous backyard jugaad only provided an imaginative quickfix based  on cutting corners in an effort to be street smart. There was no thought of ensuring a permanent solution.

In the long run, such jugaad becomes uneco-nomic. For one, the efficiency of a jugaad product based on another product quite often turns out to be lower than the original use it was intended for. Besides, there could also be patent violations if there was mass production based on a patent protected item. In any case, scaling up is not feasible since many jugaad products meet only localised niche requirements. The National Innovation Foundation of India has done a lot to showcase innovation in the rural areas but has been unable to help with scaling up production of such products precisely because of these reasons. A stellar example is the MittiCool Clay Refrige-rator which runs without electricity. It’s a much-need product in rural areas, but its high cost has proved to be a deterrent and offtake has been extremely poor.

Yet, over the years, jugaad has caught the imagination of academics and management experts, who have spun their theories on the importance of jugaad for meeting the needs of the poorest segments of society. The earliest book in this genre was CK Prahalad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid some 20 years ago. Since then more management studies have come out, such as Jugaad Innovation: A Frugal and Flexible Approach to Innovation for the 21st Century. But the focus was entirely on India.

Now, jugaad innovation has become a marketing principle that is gaining worldwide attention as companies realise that frugal innovation is crucial for tapping the markets of developing countries. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has in its "Direction of Innovation" report devoted much space to jugaad as an important way to help low-income developing countries. But there is a crucial difference. While India’s ubiquitous backyard jugaad was not durable, WIPO cites the examples of companies that use high levels of technology to provide more lasting solutions to the needs of the poorer developing countries which are constrained in their ability to absorb the technology produced by advanced nations. This is important because such countries do not also have the capacity to generate technological solutions of their own to meet their specific socio-economic needs.

Since price is one of the main constraints, most innovation efforts are geared toward reducing costs, or stripping out features of the technology to leave just what is needed. The example WIPO highlights as an exemplary item of jugaad or frugal innovation is that of Transsion, a little known Chinese mobile phone maker and service provider which produces phones specifically for the African market.

The company has captured over 40 per cent of the mobile phone market in Africa, outperforming giants like China’s own Huawei and Xiaomi and, of course, Apple, Samsung and Nokia.

It did this by understanding what many African consumers wanted while designing a technology that addressed issues such as weak network signals, limited coverage and unreliable access to electricity, among other constraints.

WIPO emphasises that frugal innovation or jugaad does not mean just cutting down on costs and inputs. “Adapting frontier technologies to make them  affordable requires high levels of technical knowledge,” it says. Some experts have cited Tata’s Nano car as an example of a corporate attempt at a more durable solution to provide more compact and affordable vehicles to families in India who use two-wheelers to ferry as many as four people. But that experiment failed, apparently, because the company failed to take into account the socio-economic profile of the market segment it was addressing.

Multinationals are helping India take the concept of jugaad to a higher level and to a global market. When US firm GE adapted its ecg and ultrasound medical devices for rural consumers in India and China, it used its subsidiaries in these countries to re-engineer the devices to make them smaller and cheaper—but without compromising on their quality. “The result was so successful that eventually GE started selling these adapted units to consumers in high-income economies as well,” according to WIPO.

Local adaptation of foreign technologies can lead to innovation that is valuable to industria-lised countries, too. But is this jugaad as we understand it, or a kind of revision innovation?

This was first published in the 16-29 February, 2024 print edition of Down To Earth

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