by John Elliott
21. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/india-as-it-is-%E2%80%93-a-spoof%E2%80%99s-eye-view/
22. http://www.macmillandictionary.com/thesaurus/british/implosion#implosion_4
I
JUGAAD/CHALTA HAI
1
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 Oxford) 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 leather 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 workmanship, proving that internationally competitive products can be produced. Jugaad has consequently 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 inventions,4 and management books are putting jugaad on a pinnacle of achievement.
Jugaad Innovation5 by 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 cash, called it a ‘breakthrough growth strategy’. It argued that jugaad is a better low-cost method of innovation than international companies’ high-budget, structured research and development programmes which, the book says, lack flexibility and are elitist and insular. The authors suggested six jugaad principles: ‘seek opportunity in adversity, do more with less, think and act flexibly, keep it simple, include the margin, follow your heart’. They say that jugaad is about developing a ‘good enough solution that gets the job done’.
That is fine for management theory, and it might encourage companies to take a fresh look at their innovation programmes, but the reality is that India has for decades relied on jugaad instead of looking for new levels of performance and excellence. It has linked this with the more negative attitude of chalta hai, which literally means ‘it walks’ and is broadly interpreted as ‘anything goes’. Together this means that, like an archetypal Indian wedding, delays and organizational chaos will give way to razzmatazz and a great tamasha on the day, providing sufficient jugaad has been spread around. Kaam chalao is another rather negative rendering of the same theme, meaning ‘will make do’ in a makeshift and improvised way, without the innovation of a clever jugaad.
Such a culture intuitively sees no need for rigid structures and rules and, where they do exist, instinctively fudges and evades them, trusting that eventually all will be well, which of course it increasingly often is not. The laid-back approach has support through another phrase – Ram bharose, ‘trusting in god’, or more specifically, ‘leaving it to Lord Ram’ – Ram, or Rama, being the Hindu god who is worshipped as a legendary king as well as a deity.
This was fine – indeed constructive – when independent India was building a new nation. ‘The concept of quality used to be that if it works somehow, it’s okay, but it doesn’t need to work all the time,’ Baba Kalyani, chairman of Pune-based Bharat Forge, which has grown into one of the world’s biggest forgings companies, told me in 2007 for a Fortune magazine article.6 That concept stemmed from the decades before 1991 when the government’s industrial licensing system created shortages and restricted competition, making it both difficult and unnecessary to produce quality goods. ‘No one could create a high-technology, high-capital-cost business. You waited a year for an equipment-import licence, got less than you wanted, then paid 80 per cent import duty – and interest rates were at 18–20 per cent,’ said Kalyani.
These attitudes should have become less universal when India began developing a new economy after 1991, but they are still in place and continue to harm the country. Jugaad no longer works effectively because the pace and complexity of rapidly changing events and communication make it impossible for India to run its basic services, projects and development on the basis of quick fixes, comforted by the faith that something will turn up to save the day.
This was graphically demonstrated when the country was held up to international ridicule over corrupt and slothful preparations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi. There are many other examples with less satisfactory outcomes. The most evident involve public sector infrastructure, ranging from annual monsoon flooding that cripples Mumbai and inadequate services in Delhi’s shiny new satellite city of Gurgaon to unhealthy water supplies emanating from Delhi’s polluted and sewage-ridden Yamuna river, building collapses, and outdated defence equipment. Incredibly, radioactive steel scrap was found in a Delhi recycling yard in 2010.7
Together, jugaad and chalta hai contribute to a matrix of factors that prevent India from excelling. While jugaad provides for the Ambassador car’s longevity and Dharavi’s successes, chalta hai means that companies, both Indian and foreign, tolerate the urban chaos around their office towers. There is tolerance of poor maintenance of India’s massive railway system; when serious crashes lead to loss of life, government ministers silence criticism and avoid the need for follow-up action by handing out financial compensation to victims’ families. Jugaad leads to cannibalization of spare parts of fighter jets and army tanks, while chalta hai has over the years led to depleted defence preparedness and a failure to tackle urgent security issues with new organizational and other arrangements. ‘India’s capacity for self-deception is extreme, and this constitutes the gravest threat to national security,’ says the Institute for conflict Management. ‘Counterterrorism policies have been based principally on political posturing, and not on objective and urgent considerations of strategy and response ... creating an illusion of security has been given far greater priority than giving real muscle and substance to the country’s terrorism apparatus’.8
In another dimension, foreign executives talk about staff trying to disrupt established management procedures and structures so that jugaad can come into play (maybe, or maybe not, to facilitate extortion and bribes). A European finance director marvels with frustrated bewilderment at the way his Indian taxation staff fudge and ignore established procedures and work with the taxation authorities in impenetrable ways that eventually produce acceptable results.9
Jugaad therefore does more harm than good. While often solving problems, it leads to complacency and acceptance of things as they are. It encourages and facilitates the undermining and corruption of i
nstitutions, which has become a serious problem. As a result, much of the country is in a constant state of unstable and sometimes fatal underperformance that often benefits those in authority because they can bypass the failures and gain from the chaos. This situation is exacerbated by widespread corruption, with both the public and private sectors assuming they can buy their way into contracts and out of poor quality performance and consequential problems. officials place contracts that (appear to) sort out the chaos with companies that are adept at playing the game. Why build a good road that could last years if you can bribe officials to accept substandard work at inflated overinvoiced prices, and then bribe them again to let you do the repairs, again with substandard materials charged at overinvoiced prices? The same disregard applies to hygiene. This was demonstrated tragically in July 2013 when 27 children died after eating food – possibly contaminated by insecticide – provided by a government midday meal scheme at their primary school in Bihar.
It often seems that life in India is not valued highly. Public services are allowed to decay, and there is scant concern for public safety. The narrow streets of areas such as old Delhi, mostly inaccessible in an emergency, are full of overcrowded, unlawfully extended buildings of poor quality construction, strewn with jumbles of low-hanging electrical wires and potentially dangerous equipment. Mumbai’s chief fire officer said in March 2013 that, out of 1,857 buildings inspected for fire safety facilities, only 237 – just 13 per cent – fully complied. The service had issued notices to over 1,000 buildings for not following fire safety norms, and there were over 5,000 high-rise buildings yet to be inspected.10
In Kolkata, at least 20 people were killed in February 2013 in a market fire, while 93 had died in a hospital fire 14 months earlier and there were 45 deaths in a fire in a block of flats in March 2010. Some of the people responsible were arrested, including businessmen who owned the hospital, but that was primarily a political gesture by the state government to appease public criticism and nothing basic was done to improve fire services and clear unsafe buildings. It was reported in Delhi in April 2013 that there were only ten inspectors for the city’s 30,000 licensed lifts, none of which had ever lost their licences.11 This is, of course, not just an Indian problem. One of the most tragic results of faulty construction and irrelevant safety regulations was reported from Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, in April 2013 when an eight-storey factory building collapsed, causing the deaths of over 1,100 people who had been working in appalling conditions. Over the previous decade, more than 700 textile and apparel industry workers had died in fires and building disasters.12
Such problems are just too enormous to be tackled in the foreseeable future, and the basic attitudes pose greater risks as the economy grows with new technologies. In the light of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster in March 2011, one wonders if India can be relied on to ensure sustained safety standards if it goes ahead with its planned series of nuclear power plants.13 Union Carbide’s pesticide plant disaster in the city of Bhopal in 1984 was basically caused by a disregard for safety and management procedures, as I discovered on a series of visits at the time. The Indian management had ignored a warning issued two years earlier by experts from the US parent company about ‘the adequacy of the tank relief valve to relieve a runaway reaction’.14 That led to the death of over 5,000 people and continued ill health of over 500,000 in one of the world’s worst industrial calamities. Nearly 30 years later, the 70-acre site has still not been cleared and cleaned up, and the ground is contaminated with dangerous chemicals at over 500 times the Indian standard levels.15 Gaunt rusting steel structures and dilapidated factory buildings stand as a grim reminder of poor company management and inadequate government control, and nothing has been learned.
Notes
1. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/thinkers-ponder-whats-amiss-in-india-is-it-jugaad/
2. ‘Lauded by the World’, Business Standard, 27 July 2013, http://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/lauded-by-the-world-113072601051_1.html
3. ‘Thinkers ponder what’s amiss in India – is it jugaad?’ Riding the Elephant, http://wp.me/pieST-1AI
4. ‘Jugaad: The Rise of Frugal Innovation, BBC Radio 4, 18 October 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03cv473
5. Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu and Simone Ahuja, Jugaad Innovation: A Frugal and Flexible Approach to Innovation for the 21st century, Random House India, 2012, http://jugaadinnovation.com/
6. JE, ‘Manufacturing takes off in India’, Fortune magazine, 19 October 2007, http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/18/news/international/India_ manufacturing.fortune/index.htm
7. Jason Overdorf, India: Radioactive in Delhi, GlobalPost, 20 April 2010, http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100419/india-garbage-delhi-radiation
8. ‘India Assessment: 2013’, South Asia Terrorism Portal, http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/index.html
9. Conversation with JE
10. ‘Hands full with highrise checks, BMC fire brigade to expand’, Indian Express, 25 March 2013, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/hands-full-with-highrise-checks-bmc-fire-brigade-to-expand-cell/1043853
11. ‘Delhi has only 10 inspectors for 30,000 lifts’, The Times of India, 17 April 2013, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Delhi-has-only-10-inspectors-for-30000-lifts/articleshow/19588179.cms
12. Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies assessment reported in ‘Bangladesh building collapse unlikely to spur reform, experts say’. Mark Magnier, Los Angeles Times, describes the disaster and the background. 25 April 2013, http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-bangladesh-collapse-20130426,0,1747667.story
13. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/india%E2%80%99s-jugaad-means-its-nuke-power-plans-should-be-dumped/
14. JE, ‘Indian plant management warned of safety risks, Financial Times, 11 December 1984 – one of a series of FT reports by JE from Bhopal on the disaster
15. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/serious-chemical-contamination-25-years-after-bhopal%E2%80%99s-lethal-gas-leak-new-study/
2
Fixes and Frugal Benefits
The word jugaad is used for many things. Traditionally, it is the name of a rough pick-up truck type of vehicle assembled in India’s northern states of Punjab and Uttar Pradesh with a front end often made from half a motorbike and the rest from a few planks of wood on wheels. It rumbles through towns and villages, belching noisily, overladen with people, animals, farm produce and other goods. Its owners do not usually pay taxes and are in violation of motor vehicle laws, despite occasional government and court attempts to curb its use.1
The vehicle was created some 70 years ago in the city of Ludhiana, in Punjab, which has always been a centre for innovation and has grown into one of the world’s biggest cycle producing centres – and India’s most polluted city.2 Alongside small fume-generating engineering workshops, Ludhiana’s big companies include Hero Cycles and Atlas Cycles, which are among the world’s biggest bicycle manufactures and account for 60 per cent of India’s sales. ‘Originally, the small workshops just produced components, then they gradually assembled them into finished products, generating what is now widely recognized as jugaad,’ says Sudarshan Maini, who runs a company in southern India that excels in fine engineering.3
Jugaad can also mean fixing a bribe. ‘Is there a jugaad?’ suggests to a policeman that a payment is being offered to erase a traffic offence. It was used scathingly by a politician in 2012 to describe what he saw as the coalition government’s incompetence at ‘managing’ its continuation in power.4. The meaning has been extended to cover frugal or flexible ways of thinking and a whole range of innovative ideas. For example, farmers and fishermen send traders missed mobile phone calls as a signal that they need information on market prices (the caller cancels the call before the other party picks up, so does not have to pay).
When I started to write this book, I needed a new desk chair. I found a smart black me
sh reclining model in one of the many shops that have sprung up haphazardly along M.G. Road, a busy highway and metro railway route between Delhi and the new satellite city of Gurgaon. ‘The base and arms come from China, the mesh back from Malaysia and the hydraulics and seat are from India,’ said G.S. Arora, the owner. ‘We put them together in our local factory – that’s jugaad, a cheaper chair. Go and buy a branded chair and you’ll pay twice as much’. He was proud of the way he cobbled together his chairs, visiting China and Malaysia to source the parts, while his mother managed the shop. His is just one of many companies across the world assembling components from various sources – the booming 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 adjustment. 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 farmer 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