Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
economy of southern China's industrial coastal zones between Hong Kong, Shenzhen and
Guangzhou was built in the 1980s doing just that, but he sees it as part of a national trait.
His price was just over Rs 9,000, so I went to Godrej & Boyce, one of India's largest
groups and the best known producer of office furniture, to compare prices. A similar
branded chair was Rs 17,000 and would have taken a week or two to deliver, so I went back
to M.G. Road and drove away with my jugaad chair. The finish could have been better -
rough metal edges on the base needed filing smooth - but it was good value, even though
Arora failed to send a mechanic to boost the gas pressure that controls the seat's height ad-
justment. Someone told me that the height problem was caused by hot weather, and so it
proved - when the winter came, the seat stopped sliding downwards. Chalta hai!
There are countless examples of more innovative jugaad-inspired design. In Rajasthan,
a small thriving family business is producing handmade paper from elephants' high-fibre
dung. 5 A potter in Gujarat developed a low-cost refrigerator called Mitticool ( mitti means
earth) that is not made of metal and uses no electricity but cools with water seeping through
the gadget's clay walls. 6 In a rather upmarket version of the original jugaad vehicle, a farm-
er in Gujarat developed a small low-cost three-wheeler tractor called the Santi around a
Royal Enfield Bullet motorbike, enabling him to replace his costly bullocks for a variety of
tasks such as ploughing. 7
Anvar Alikhan, a senior corporate executive, points to jugaad's roots in what he de-
scribes as 'the austere, socialistic India of the 1970s, when we were deprived of everything,
and had to make do with whatever we could'. Giving a personal example, he says, 'When I
was a teenager, I was shopping for my first music system and the only thing available was
a very mediocre Philips system - which in any case was beyond my budget. So I finally
bought an ingenious music system put together by an IIT engineer friend, which had its
bass speaker placed inside an earthenware matka [terracotta pot] . The sound was terrific.'
People often joke that 'it's jugaad' when they innovate to solve a problem. At Kipling
jungle camp on the edge of Kanha National Park in the middle of India, I saw people burn-
ing leaves at the bottom of a freshly dug pit, prior to planting a tree. When I asked why,
they replied, 'To burn out the termites - it's jugaad.' Another day, a plumber said the same
thing when he temporarily nailed a vice, which would normally be fixed on a work bench,
into a tree trunk to hold pipes that he needed to bend.
Business in the DNA
This sort of basic industrial innovation comes more naturally to artisanal, farming and
other production-oriented communities than to India's mostly trading-based businessmen,
according to Harish Damodaran, a business journalist who has studied the caste and re-
Search WWH ::




Custom Search