Quick-fix country at jugaad crossroads- To junk or not to junk a symbol
G.S. MUDUR May 16, 2013
New Delhi, May 15: When news broke that the Supreme Court had described jugaad as a “menace to public safety”, some sighs were emitted. Not for the rag-tag contraption that ferries humans and materials but for the concept of quick-fix improvisation that the word came to symbolise in India.
The court said jugaad, the vehicles that run mostly in northern India on diesel-powered irrigation pumps, would have to be registered and carry third party insurance.
The scientific community appears split over jugaad, the concept. While some scientists who specialise in technology innovation believe jugaad is not something to celebrate, others contend that such improvisations cannot be dismissed as they have at times helped achieve objectives even in high-technology domains.
India’s first home-grown scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) — an instrument that allows scientists to probe surfaces at the atomic level — was, some say, fabricated during the 1980s through as much or even more jugaad as is required to put together the passenger transport contraptions.
“This STM effort by physicists in Pune was a concrete example of jugaad in science and technology,” said Pankaj Sekhsaria, a researcher in Hyderabad, pursuing a doctoral degree in the culture of innovation through the Maastricht University in The Netherlands.
Physicist C.V. Dharmadhikari and his colleagues at the University of Pune used a discarded refrigerator, stepper motors from junked computers, tubes from car tyres, and bungee chords to fabricate the first STM, Sekhsaria has documented this week in Current Science, a journal published by the Indian Academy of Sciences.
They also used weights from grocers’ shops, aluminium vessels from kitchens and bobbins from sewing machines to make the first prototype STM, Sekhsaria said.
Each component had a specific role in the instrument. The refrigerator, for example, served as an acoustic shell.
“The microscopes worked very well, and the scientists were able to publish research papers in leading peer-reviewed journals,” Sekhsaria told The Telegraph. “Something shouldn’t be dismissed just because it involved jugaad.”
Scientists familiar with the history of the Indian space programme recall how the country’s first experimental communications satellite called APPLE (Ariane Passenger Payload Experiment) was ferried a short distance on a bullock cart before its launch via a European rocket in 1981.
Researchers point out that unusual innovation is not something unique to India. Cyrus Modi, who teaches history of science, technology and engineering at the Rice University in the US, has published a paper where he has described how European researchers used “hand-crushed pawn-shop diamonds glued to tinfoil cantilevers with brushes made from their own eyebrow hair” in fabricating components of atomic force microscopes.
But a senior Indian chemical engineer and an expert in technology innovation said he did not even like the word jugaad.
“We should not be celebrating this at all,” said Raghunath Mashelkar, former director general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, New Delhi. “I’m not saying we should not appreciate the improvisation efforts that may have had societal impacts, but India needs to move to the next level, and that won’t come by celebrating jugaad,” Mashelkar said.
“What India should aim for is affordable excellence — the two terms may sound contradictory, but that’s what we should be doing,” he said.
Some analysts have linked jugaad to risk and questioned its value as a developmental tool. “Jugaad is a product of widespread poverty and underpins dependencies stemming from dilapidated infrastructure, unsafe transport practices, and resource constraints,” Thomas Birtchnell, a researcher from Lancaster University in the UK wrote two years ago in a paper published in Contemporary South Asia.
“Jugaad impacts on society in negative and undesirable ways... these factors make it wholly unsuitable as a development tool,” Birtchnell wrote.
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