Jugaad and its limits

A truck stands on a highway shoulder with a broken leaf spring. The nearest service point is two hundred kilometres away and shut; the nearest part is a week out. A mechanic under a tarpaulin up the road cuts a spring section out of another truck, hammers it to fit, and the vehicle is rolling again in ninety minutes.

The scene is told as evidence of a national gift for improvisation. Look instead at what it contains: a part that cannot be bought, a supply chain that stops before this point on the map, a service network that does not exist here, an operator who cannot afford a week. Improvisation happens at the end of that list. It is a response to a system, and its shape is set by the shape of the failure.

One word, three different things

Jugaad is colloquial, and its reach is part of the problem. It covers a repair, an arrangement, a way around a rule, and, since about 2010, a management philosophy.

The first is repair culture: skill transmitted by apprenticeship, dense in particular streets, often very good. The second is a grey workaround: work done off the record, a test skipped, a tolerance judged by eye, and the risk an institution would have carried transferred to whoever stands next to the machine. The third is a story about the first two, packaged for an audience that will meet neither.

The third borrows its credibility from the first. Anyone who has watched a good mechanic work will believe a claim about Indian ingenuity, and that belief is then used to support a claim about systems, which the mechanic never made. A skill and an argument about why the skill is necessary are two sentences, and only one is true.

Why the repair sector exists at all

The roadside workshop is not a cultural remnant. It is an industry with a cost structure, kept alive by four conditions. Labour is cheap relative to capital, so a business built on hours undercuts one built on machines. The parts channel is fragmented, so a workshop that knows forty suppliers can produce a part no catalogue lists. Standardisation is low, so tolerances forgive and another model's component can be made to fit. And the fleet outlives its warranty, leaving owners with no reason to return to the dealer.

Scale the last point. The country has roughly 300 million registered vehicles, about three in four of them two-wheelers, on about 6.3 million kilometres of road. A new vehicle typically carries a warranty of three years or 100,000 kilometres. The dealer network is a city institution; most of the fleet is not in a city, and after year three neither is the city fleet.

Low standardisation cuts both ways. It makes improvisation possible, because a component can be adapted rather than specified, and necessary, because nothing is plug-and-play. A market with tight standards and deep parts distribution has less repair culture because it needs less of one. Skill and gap come from the same condition.

When it works, and when it stops

Improvisation is rational under conditions that can be listed. The failure is visible. Its consequence is bounded. The machine can be stopped while it is worked on. The fix can be reversed. The person carrying the risk is the person operating the machine.

It stops at three boundaries. Safety: brakes, steering, structural members, anything whose failure mode is an event rather than a breakdown. Precision: metrology, calibration, anything held to a tolerance that must be demonstrated rather than approximated. Liability: anything insured, inspected or required to leave a paper trail, where an undocumented repair is not a cheap repair but an uninsured risk with a receipt.

There is also a structural reason the practice never corrects the condition that produces it. A workaround is optimised for time and succeeds locally. Because it succeeds, the failure is never recorded; because it is never recorded, it never enters a parts forecast, a warranty claim, or a decision about where to open a service point; because it never enters those, the supply chain stays as thin as it was.

The double edge for manufacturing

For the user, a machine fixable at the roadside is better than one that is not. As an industrial signal the same fact is corrosive. If a breakdown costs two hours and a few hundred rupees, reliability is not worth paying for, a service network is not worth building, and designing for serviceability is not worth the engineering hours. The manufacturer externalises the after-sales problem onto a sector it does not employ, certify or count.

The handover is visible in the calendar. The manufacturer's obligation ends at three years; the mechanic's begins. Diagnostics, genuine parts and a record of what was replaced stop being produced exactly when the vehicle starts to need them. The cost does not vanish. It moves into a household and a workshop that appears in no service-quality statistic.

The second limit is less discussed. Skill at repair is not skill at design. Repair knowledge is tacit — in hands, in a local network of suppliers, in the memory of which model's part fits which other — and it does not convert into drawings, tolerances or process control. A country can be very good at keeping old machines running and poor at making new ones, and the first competence offers no bridge to the second.

The story it becomes

In 2012 three authors published a book arguing that constraint produces a distinctive, exportable creativity. As description much of it is accurate: the cases are real, the constraints are real, the ingenuity is real. As prescription it is weak, and the weakness is instructive, because its unit of analysis is the successful case. The fixes that failed are absent, not because they are rare but because a failed improvisation leaves no narrator.

The stronger objection is causal. Constraint does not produce creativity in general; it produces a specific kind — creativity that routes around a system rather than building one. That is what you want in an emergency, and what will not accumulate into capability, because each solution is disposable by design and none writes anything down. Then the story travels, and when it comes home it has a new function: a reason not to fix the system. "We are good at this" can be said sincerely by a mechanic and profitably by someone who benefits from things staying as they are.

Antifragility makes this worse by sounding technical. A system that survives shocks by improvising is not gaining from disorder; it is absorbing disorder at a cost, and the cost falls on whoever holds the risk when the improvisation fails. Three questions separate the cases. Who bears the risk if it fails? Is the fix recorded anywhere? Does it make the next failure less likely, or only less visible? Repair culture passes the second and third and is honest about the first. The grey workaround fails the first by construction. The packaged story fails all three, because it is not a practice but a description of one, written by someone who was not there.

None of this argues that jugaad is bad. The mechanic is doing skilled work under conditions someone else arranged. It argues that praising the skill and repairing the reason for it are different activities, and the first is far cheaper, which is why it is performed so often. The interesting question is not how good he is. It is why the spring still has to be cut from another truck.

This is a piece in Everyday Life, part of About India.