There’s a Jugaad for Everything!
By: Shruti Krishnan
Tags: India, Indian Culture, Jugaad, Indian, Innovation

There’s a Jugaad for Everything!

A.K.A Innovation Indian Style :)

Regular People: “I guess we won’t be able to make this trip happen, we are short on the budget for accommodation.” Jugaadu: “That’s not an issue. I have a Jugaad!”

For those of you who are new to this world, let me shine my torchlight on it for you! “Jugaad” is a Hindi word which means “to find creative and cheap (or affordable) solutions to problems”. It’s a super smart idea thought up by someone to keep panicky situations leading to failure of plan under control.

Over the years, life has gotten more and more complicated. Our needs and requirements have increased, and so has the need to make our wants, creations, ideas, and our life whole, adhere to the framework of extreme economic unpredictability, rapidly developing technological front and increasingly depleting natural resources. With massive increase in development and modernization comes a massive increase in basic problems and scarcities.

So we usually tend to give up on finding a solution to these problems which arise with change of times and lifestyles, but then sometimes when people put their heads together, they come up with amazing solutions to the problems. Many a time, these solutions don’t just solve one problem, but many! Thus by seeing each problem as a potential opportunity to improve life on our planet, you don’t just help a group of people, but the whole of mankind as such.

Jugaadus are basically members of an imaginary “Think-Tank” !!

Everyone comes under the banner of these “people who need Jugaads in their lives”, even my bunch, the student fraternity, even we need those last minute ideas for our projects and presentations, which we never bother to complete when we had time, and not just that…we need Jugaads for those last minute surprise parties which we organize like 10 minutes after we suddenly remember that it’s our friend’s birthday.

Almost all Indian households practice Jugaad to make the most of what they have.

Jugaad is not just a word which depicts a whole new way of cooking up constructive and innovative ideas, it is a feeling, and it’s like a ray of hope! It’s the word which gives people hope that things can be fixed, and that there’s still a chance for everything to go by plan!

Now here are some common Jugaads that we usually come across in our everyday life :

1. Just some friends helping out each other!

2. Even these little guys have video referrals these days!!

3. Now u can chill your beer in the room without owning a minibar!!

4. Who says CDs are outdated and useless??

5. The universal remote!! Can be used for the TV, the radio, music system, for turning fans, opening doors.etc.(subject to creativity!)

6. Just hanging around. You won’t even have to book a seat if you happen to be this creative!

7. Pentium 4 wall cabinet is here people!! Run to your nearest electronic junk stores and get yourself one too!

8.Just in case you can’t find a ladle.

And many more…

The Jugaad culture, however, is not limited to India. Thousands of extremely bright entrepreneurs — including many social entrepreneurs who operate on a shoestring budget and are aiming at addressing societal problems — across developing economies such as China, Africa, and Brazil, use Jugaad to overcome adversity and create socially-valuable solutions.

In Kenya, for instance, entrepreneurs have invented a device that enables bicycle riders to charge their cell phones while pedalling.

In the Philippines, Illac Diaz has deployed “A Litre of Light” — a recycled plastic bottle containing bleach-processed water that refracts sunlight, producing the equivalent of a 55-watt light bulb — in thousands of makeshift houses in off-the-grid shantytowns.

And in Lima, Peru (with high humidity and only 1 inch of rain per year), an engineering college has designed advertising billboards that can convert humid air into potable water.

Jugaad is a word which has been taken up by the English Dictionaries ( because there is no word to replace the essence of this word, also I think it sounds amazing too!), though it does have a meaning similar to that of “hack”, making it one among many other Hindi words to have made it into the International vocabulary!!

There are loads of Jugaads that even you must have come up with knowingly or unknowingly, do share your own Jugaads with all of us in the comments section so even we can make use of your ingenious ideas!!

P.C- Pintrest, Quora