India’s Master Plan - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 3

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India's Master Plan
One of the magical things about India is its unpredictability and its ability to turn muddle
and adversity into success. This is true of many countries, of course, especially developing
economies, but in India it has been turned into an art form and governs the way that vast
areas of the country operate. In the days of the pre-1991 Licence Raj, when government
controls restricted what companies could do and people could buy, this approach enabled
the country to work, creakily, until systems and machinery broke down and were patched
up again to judder on inefficiently. 1 Hindustan Motors' Ambassador car, which is still being
produced, 2 is an archetypal example of such patchwork. Its 60-year-old (British Morris Ox-
ford) body has been remoulded on the edges and smartened up with chrome strips, and the
engine, gearbox and other parts have been replenished over the years, while the basic car
has remained the same.
This kind of jugaad, which means making do and innovating with what is available, can
be many things, both good and bad. It is the knack of turning shortages, chaos and adversity
into some sort of order and success, and it enables the poor in India to benefit from low-
cost adaptations and innovations with fixes such as using a belt from a motorbike wheel to
run an irrigation pump, using a Pringles potato crisps container to bridge a piping gap in a
car engine, and applying turmeric powder to fix a radiator leak. 3 It leads to the innovation
that drives entrepreneurial activity - for example, in slums like the world-famous Dharavi
in Mumbai where, in filthy conditions, there is an informal and unregulated $750m-$1bn a
year parallel economy with businesses ranging from the manufacture of good-quality leath-
er goods to recycling of plastics and electronic hardware. Some 60,000 families live there,
tightly packed amid the squalor.
The positive aspects of jugaad are being lauded internationally because of what some
auto industry executives and others call India's 'frugal engineering', where the best is made
of minimal resources for the lowest cost. This has appeared over the past decade as India's
manufacturing industry has begun to shed an image of inefficiency and poor workman-
ship, proving that internationally competitive products can be produced. Jugaad has con-
sequently become a management fad and is being praised outside India as a great Indian
invention. The BBC made a 30-minute radio programme revelling in jugaad's canny inven-
tions, 4 and management topics are putting jugaad on a pinnacle of achievement.
Jugaad Innovation 5 b y Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu and Simone Ahuja, published in
2012 when the world's economy was in a downturn and many companies were strapped for