Assassinating Jugaad: The case for rigor -I

Assassinating Jugaad: The case for rigor - I


Last fall the colloquial Hindi term  jugaad was included in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) update - an event that was widely celebrated1. But, what does jugaad truly mean? The OED defines jugaad as "a flexible approach to problem-solving that uses limited resources in an innovative way" and it is this conflation of jugaad with 'innovation' that has brought the term into popular use. Wikipedia states that "Jugaad is increasingly accepted as a management technique and is recognized all over the world as an acceptable form of frugal engineering at peak in India”. So today, jugaad is much like the two faced Roman god Janus, where one face symbolizes a struggle against adversity, while the other symbolizes ‘frugal innovation’. India’s souls yearns to be a jagat-guru once again, and it has embraced the concept of ‘jugaad’ with open arms. But, jugaad is also a mind set. A mind set of shortcutting; flouting tapasya in pursuit of goals; settling for the superficial; discounting rigorous endeavour. No country can ever hope to become a superpower with jugaad as its model, and India is not going to be an exception to this rule. If India wants to become a super-power in the coming decades, it needs to assassinate jugaad. Jugaad is poison and its antidotes are rigor and tapasya.

To outline my case, I have divided up the essay into two parts. First, I talk about frugal innovation and how most celebrated frugal innovations come from years or even decades of rigorous work and not from jugaad-based short-cuts. Later, I clarify how jugaad cannot solve complex problems. These  ideas form the two pillars of my central thesis –  jugaad is detrimental to the growth of India. Relying on jugaad to spur the growth of India is like putting water in the fuel tank of a car and expecting good mileage.

Frugal engineering is not jugaad:

In India, jugaad is used as a synonym for frugal engineering. This lie has been propagated by the many illiterate pundits we have in our national discourse today. Ask yourself this question – what are the major technological innovations that have been transformative for  society, and how many of them were powered by jugaad? Was your cell phone invented by a jugaadu scientist? Was your computer the product of an assembly line powered by the electricity of jugaad? What about the internet that is enabling you to read this article? None of these innovations came from jugaad. Here are a few examples attributed to the world of frugal science and how they are truly changing the world around you.

My first exhibit is ISRO’s Mangalyaan. Mangalyaan, or the Mars Orbiter Mission, cost India $7.4 crore resulting in one of the least expensive interplanetary space missions ever. Its amazing success catapulted India into an elite club of space farers. Compared with an almost co-incident NASA mission, Maven, which cost $67 crore, Mangalyaan was truly an affordable space mission. This fact alone was enough for pundits to pronounce it an epitome of jugaad2. But, Mangalyaan was no jugaad. Conceived by brilliant minds and dexterously managed by India’s top scientists, Mangalyaan was the product of rigorous S&T by ISRO and decades of conscientious attention to detail. The mission itself was launched on PSLV-C25 (the 25th version of PSLV). There have been close to 40 launches by PSLV to date, with the  first one occurring in 1993. Mangalyaan owes its 2014 success to  this rigorously tested workhorse, which undoubtedly incorporated contributions from hundreds of scientists over its decades of developmental work. Prior to the launch, extensive tests were carried out to achieve the desired scientific outputs, and results from many of these feasibility trials can be found in peer-reviewed journals3. Moreover, Mangalyaan’s slingshot path to Mars required pinpoint accuracy in calculating  the flight path. The spacecraft also carried five scientific payloads, and the Mars Color Camera onboard the craft has provided with many fascinating images of Mars, including the now iconic image seen below.  Mangalyaan is hardly a poster-boy for jugaad. On the contrary, it is a testament to the rigorous work and excellence that ISRO has achieved over the past few decades. But, what is the issue with calling this jugaad? Allow me to present two more exhibits before I elaborate on this issue.

 A photo of Mars by Mangalyaan. Image courtesy ISRO.



Exhibit B – Foldscope microscope from Prof. Manu Prakash’s Lab at Stanford. Foldscope is “ an ultra-affordable field microscope, that you build from common materials such as paper” and “with magnification of 140X and imaging resolution of 2 micron”3  it promises to revolutionize microscopy by bringing it to the masses. At a cost of approximately INR 304, it is  a cost effective microscope and  a brilliant example of frugal innovation. Prof. Manu Prakash informs me that he never really liked the word jugaad and he asserts that “frugal science is about finding solutions to problems that break the cost barrier - but a lot of intellectual rigor and thinking goes in finding the right solutions5”. In fact, they have been designing, redesigning, adapting and testing Foldscope for over six years! Part of this work is detailed in a rigorous peer-reviewed manuscript published in Plos One (open-access)6.  

Exhibit C – Paper microfluidics from Prof. George Whitesides Group at Harvard University. Paper microfluidics devices are economical diagnostic platforms manufactured from an abundant and relatively low cost material – paper7. By making miniature channels on paper and using very small volumes of reagents this innovation promises to make diagnostics simpler, more affordable and easily accessible to many.


There is a common element to all Exhibits – A, B and C. Have you been able to spot it? All these examples of frugal innovation come from the most distinguished labs in the world. The reason this happens is because even frugal innovation must be rigorously tested and proven  robust to succeed in the real-world. These requirements of rigorousness and robustness are what a word like jugaad completely misses. It lulls us under the false impression that innovation can develop from non-rigorous sources that such innovation can catapult India into an elite league of innovative countries. Unfortunately, it cannot and relying the mind set of jugaad to spearhead innovation will only lead to senseless illogical solutions to serious problems.

In my next essay, I will show how jugaad is fundamentally incapable of solving complex technical problems.

References and Notes

1. http://www.thehindu.com/books/from-gulab-jamun-to-jugaad-70-indian-words-added-to-oxford-english-dictionary/article19944063.ece
&
http://www.indiatvnews.com/lifestyle/news-jugaad-indian-origin-hindi-word-now-included-in-oxford-english-dictionary-408888

2. http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/Getting-to-Mars-through %E2%80%98jugaad%E2%80%99/article11061060.ece

& 

 https://www.thebetterindia.com/87053/isro-pslv-world-record-mars-orbiter-mission-jugaad-innovation/

3. Raghavaiah, V., Sowjanya, P., Mini, R.L., Murthy, P.V.N., Muniraja, S.M., Renuka, R., Murali, G.R., Binu, D., Sankaranarayanan, S., Kumar, V.S. and Srinivas, B.S., 2014, December. Electromagnetic compatibility of MARS Orbiter Mission spacecraft. In Microwave and RF Conference (IMaRC), 2014 IEEE International (pp. 209-212). IEEE.

&

Sundararajan, V., 2013. Mangalyaan-Overview and Technical Architecture of India's First Interplanetary Mission to Mars. In AIAA SPACE 2013 Conference and Exposition (p. 5503). 
4. http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2014/03/10/stanford-bioengineer-develops-a-50-cent-paper-microscope/

5. Personal Communication

6. Cybulski, J.S., Clements, J. and Prakash, M., 2014. Foldscope: origami-based paper microscope. PloS one, 9(6), p.e98781.


7. https://www.elveflow.com/microfluidic-tutorials/microfluidic-reviews-and-tutorials/paper-microfluidic-devices-a-review-2017/

Disclaimer:  All posts should be treated as personal opinion of the author, unless explicitly stated otherwise. All material is copyright of Dr. Aloke Kumar, unless stated otherwise.

Conflict of Interest: There is no conflict of interest to declare. 

About the author: Dr. Aloke Kumar is currently an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Twitter handle: @aalokelab


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