Jugaad as systemic risk and disruptive innovation in India

Abstract

Jugaad is the latest/trend in management and business reports of India's awakening. The term refers to the widespread practice in rural India of jury-rigging and customizing vehicles using only available resources and know-how. While the practice is often accompanied by indigence and corruption in traditional interpretations, the notion of jugaad has excited many commentators on India's emergence into the global economy in its promise of an inimitable Indian work ethic that defies traditional associations of otherworldliness and indolence – widely reported as inherent in India's society and culture. Jugaad has been identified across India's economy in the inventiveness of call-centre workers, the creativity of global transnational elites, and in the innovativeness of Indian product designs. The term has seen an unprecedented growth in popularity and is now proffered as a tool for development and a robust solution to global recession. Jugaad is now part of a wider method for working within resource constraints as ‘Indovation’. In this context, the trope is presented as an asset that India can nurture and export. This article argues that far from being an example of ‘disruptive innovation’, jugaad in practice is in fact part and parcel of India's systemic risk and should not be separated from this framing. Viewed from this optic, jugaad impacts on society in negative and undesirable ways. Jugaad is a product of widespread poverty and underpins path dependencies stemming from dilapidated infrastructure, unsafe transport practices, and resource constraints. These factors make it wholly unsuitable both as a development tool and as a business asset. The article questions the intentions behind jugaad's wider usage and adoption and explores the underlying chauvinism at work in the term's links to India's future hegemonic potential.

Keywords:

• Jugaad
• Indovation
• Hindolence
• disruptive innovation
• Tata Nano
• Hindustan Ambassador
• transport
• Indian business elites
• mobilities
• risk
• Hinduism
• India
• South Asia

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank a number of colleagues at Lancaster University. John Urry who very kindly provided comments on a draft of the article. Monika Büscher, David Tyfield and the other participants gave very useful insights to the author's presentation on jugaad at a Centre for Mobilities (CeMoRe) research day. Paul Devadoss and Ronika Chakrabarti also contributed excellent comments at a Lancaster University Management School (LUMS) India Centre seminar. Finally, the author thanks Lorenz Herfurth at ImaginationLancaster who offered his knowledge and expertise about vehicle design and his own nostalgia for the Trabant. Research for this article was made possible by the ESRC-funded Technologies and Travel project. An earlier draft of this article was awarded the 2010 Dr. Cornelius Lely Prize by the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T2M).

Notes

1. ‘The Cambridge-trained lawyer (and early president of Congress) W. C. Bonnerjee denounced Hinduism as ‘inert, torpid, degenerate, dreaming, in thrall to outmoded ideas, lacking in energy and initiative and doomed to subordination’ (Misra 2007, 49).

2. Scholars including Voltaire, Max Weber, and Max Müller never actually visited India first-hand. Instead, they drew on translations of Indian texts and missionaries’ reports as well as classical sources and – in the latter case – contact with Indian contemporaries overseas. This in many ways shielded them from the indigence and poverty – and the climate – that other travelers to India focused on so profoundly in this period, but also curtailed their prejudices.

3. Srinivas reflects on the practice of villages obtaining contracts for road-work from the government directly, which they then undertook with local spare labor. Thus, localized risk management is a practice that is engrained in India's infrastructure system. ‘Giving small contracts to many entrepreneurs may seem more equitable, but the poor living in the villages will pay the cost of the resulting slow progress and the poor quality of the roads’ (Panagriya 2010, 407).

4. Compared to the UK where ‘Drivers 4-wheelers’ constitutes the largest deaths by road user at 36% (WHO 2009, 215).

5. Krishnan presents the jugaad ethic as a solution to the poor national capacity for innovation due to (H)indolence, which he describes as a ‘bhraminical attitude’, ‘lack of a strong time orientation’, ‘disdain for physical work’, and being ‘passive on action’ (2010, 136–140).