Source — Arya, "Jugaad: A Study in Indian Ingenuity and Improvisation" (2020)
- Title: "Jugaad: A Study in Indian Ingenuity and Improvisation"
- Author: Rina Arya, Professor of Visual Culture and Theory, University of Huddersfield
- Publication: South Asia @ LSE (London School of Economics blog)
- Date: 2020-03-09
- URL: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2020/03/09/jugaad-a-study-in-indian-ingenuity-and-improvisation/
- Accessed: 2026-09-03
- Type: secondary (academic author, blog-hosted, non-peer-reviewed); largely sympathetic/analytical stance, but explicitly names the concept's darker dimensions.
Extract
Arya glosses jugaad as approximately translating to "'quick fix', 'workaround' or 'hack'," a "quintessentially Indian concept" for negotiating the world "by improvisation and ingenuity."
Class dimension, not named by most popular sources: jugaad operates differently across India's socioeconomic strata — for lower-income populations ("Bottom of the Pyramid") it is necessity-driven problem-solving; for wealthier groups it is a way to "reduce expense and economise labour costs." Scarcity, she argues, "remains prevalent across India" and underpins the practice at every level.
Concrete examples given: television screens suspended by cables, candles used to heat saucepans, bicycle handlebars pressed into carrying goods, punctured bottles improvised as shower hoses, tiffin boxes tied to a cycle.
Business/management uptake: cites Radjou, Prabhu, and Ahuja's 2012 book Jugaad Innovation (sources/ssir-radjou-prabhu-ahuja-jugaad-innovation-excerpt.md) as positioning jugaad as "an indispensable part of a toolkit in Indian innovation," and discusses the Mitticool clay refrigerator (2009) and Tata's Nano car (2008) as commercial examples marketed under the concept.
A definitional tension, argued directly by Arya: whether jugaad's definition should stay rooted in quick, temporary, improvised fixes, or expand to cover larger, more deliberate innovation programs. She argues the more protracted, planned "innovations" businesses now market as jugaad "problematise their conceptualisation as examples of jugaad" — i.e., a scholarly critique that the popular/business usage has stretched the word past its original, more modest sense.
Darker dimensions, named explicitly: illegal electricity theft and unsafe improvised vehicles, which Arya frames as reflecting "stark disparity of socio-economic relations in India" rather than as a celebratory ingenuity story.
Gaps
- This is a blog post, not a peer-reviewed article; it is not clear how much of Arya's own analysis here has been separately peer-reviewed elsewhere.
- No discussion of the word's etymology or dictionary status.