Jugaadism – An Infantile Disorder
Jugaadism – An Infantile Disorder
Neils Bohr
once said that prediction is difficult, especially if it is about the future.
Yet, engineers, generals, planners and ruling classes are expected to predicate
their actions based on calculated expectations of the future. Jugaad hinders this
process in many ways and threatens to make our society a collective myopic failure.
It should not be admired and we must not descend into the culture of jugaadism1.
Like many seductive, but ultimately disastrous, isms of the last century it needs to be buried into an unmarked
grave.
Jugaad is a
neologism arising from the indic ‘to gather’. When the bar is set low, even gathering
ingredients is fait accompli. In touting
it as a laudable achievement, we not only hold ourselves back from the final
finished product but, more dangerously, the very process of seeking the
solution. It is the seeking, the manthan (मंथन; churning),
that is the backbone of irreversible positive development in a successful
society. The manthan is painstaking; it requires patience, perseverance
and meticulous scaffolds of rigor and evaluation. And with manthan comes both the nectar of success and the poison of
frustrating failures. Both intricately connected to each other. The proverbial
Rome is not built in a day. It is built in the night of silent reflections, the
darkness of failures, and enveloped by the frigidness of self-doubt. Jugaad
short circuits the seeking process with its piecemeal gathering approach and
its celebration spreads the contagion. If jugaad is bad, its glorification is
lethal.
A jugaadist2
culture fosters a ‘bad lifestyle’. It effectively precludes in-depth problem
solving which includes analysis, dispassionate debates and the multi-angle investigation
of its origins. In the jugaadist framework, every problem is a unique obstacle to
be overcome through clever tactics. However, for a country as vast and complex
as India, this obstacle course invariably turns to bitterness, fatalism and an
endless cycle of cynical arguments as the final complexity proves
insurmountable. In this jugaad-game the odds in the long run are never in favor.
Take air
pollution for an example. A modern bane of Indian cities where the very by-products
of economic expansion are slowly (or some would say rapidly) choking us to
death. Yet we seem helpless to tackle it. At the heart of air pollution lies a
complex technological challenge involving multiple disciplines of sciences and
engineering. However, typical debates in public discussions betray a jugaadist
mindset. Identify a visible villain such
as vehicles and then ban them on certain integer days or firecrackers, which
apparently needs to be banned completely on Diwali.
This banning
response has all the hallmarks of jugaad. It identifies the urgency of the problem,
looks at various obvious sources that can be controlled, and then stops at the most
immediate solution. Just like any other jugaadist solution, the law of
unintended consequence kicks in on the common people. The remedy for these painful
unintended consequences is equally jugaadist –increasingly bizarre list of
exceptions. Criticism of jugaadist, fragmented problem solving, is blocked by
mobs of self-righteous social media warriors. They probably don’t have the patience
to read a recent IIT Kanpur3 study which reveals that vehicular
pollution, in even a mega-city of Delhi’s size, contributes only ~9-25%
(seasonal variation accounted for) to air pollution totals.
So what
else could be contributing to pollution? A casual walk through many cities will
reveal widespread burning of trash. The photo below was taken in Bangalore in
April 2018 and shows the smoke that results from burning of even a small pile
of garbage. The acrid smell points to its deadly byproducts. Unlike
firecrackers, trash burning is not a one-night affair. The immutable laws of
fluid dynamics dictate that the carcinogenic by-products of trash burning would
travel many kilometers from its source via convection and atmospheric currents. The same phenomenon governs byproducts of
crop burning many hundred kilometers from Delhi. The effect is so dramatic that
the images are often captured by satellites4. A long time Delhi
resident and scientist Dr. Anand
Ranganathan added perspective when he compared the
crop burning effect to entire metro area of Delhi being on fire – twelve times
over!5 Similarly, wind-borne dust particles due to naked soil is yet
another major factor of pollution. A thorough manthan would lead to
solutions such as the study of crop cycles in northern India, garbage disposal
habits and development of natural ground covers such as grasses for appropriate
soils. Many of these solutions are interdependent, with feedback loops and
virtuous cycles which a jugaadist solution can never identify. For instance,
rather than burning crop thatch, it could be beneficially applied as mulch to
cover naked soil thereby improving moisture retention as well as improve
aesthetics. Similarly, agriculture research on better ground covers which can
address the challenging local environment and soil conditions would go a long
way in reducing wind based soil erosion. Such ground cover research has been
successfully done before elsewhere. For instance, University of Florida and
Texas A&M University collaborated in 1970s to produce the low maintenance Floratam
variety of grass which could withstand both blistering sun and the bug prone
southern USA climate6. This
has made covering vast tract of commercial and residential open ground
economical, contributing to improved air quality in spite of loose sandy soils
of the region. Interestingly, large amounts of air borne particles can
significantly depress solar power efficiency as shown by a recent international
multi-university study7 which includes IIT Gandhinagar, Duke University
and the University of Wisconsin. Similarly, better ground cover can benefit
ground water tables by retaining water and also preventing soil erosion into
the rivers improving river water flow. Such improved water and power
availability can then lead to cheaper power production8 and heavy-duty
garbage processing. This is just a small example where simply going beyond
jugaad can lead to a healthy public debate. There are many other instances of
jugaadism derailing well-meaning measures. The application of rigorous
concerted planning and research can hugely benefit jugaad infected initiatives
to clean Ganga, assorted manufacturing frameworks, and ad-hoc urban
infrastructure development projects.
Planned obsolescence
of jugaad must begin in the top echelons of academia and industry. Corner
cutting cultures and chalta hai (ok attitude) should be replaced by
strong non-negotiable benchmarks and deadlines. Jugaad could be encouraged as
the first step among many. Failure should not be shamed, but used as an
opportunity to learn. This failing forward will prevent the triumph of jugaadism
through the need to ‘save face’. In the
same vein, expectations must be set early and monitored regularly to prevent
last minute panic addled jugaadism. When a complex technological feat is
achieved, the solution itself should be first praised above every other metric.
Especially above the price tag. For instance, celebrating Mangalyaan with memes,
which compare its cost with the budget of the movie Gravity is counterproductive
and misses the most important achievement of the mission –its unprecedented
sustained accuracy and decades of hard work invested by ISRO scientists. In the
commercial sector, TATA Nano may have overcome many important technological
challenges, but the fact that its cheapness became the talking point ensures
that it will perhaps be forgotten completely by the coming generations.
These
adjustments will not be cheap. It is a common mistake to conflate jugaad with
frugal engineering. If driven by appropriate market forces, engineered
solutions always tend to produce products inexpensively with minimum resources.
Thus some amount of frugality is inbuilt into the very nature of engineering
and production. In fact, this ruthless cost effectiveness puts even greater
premium on rigor and research. As Stanford professor Dr. Manu Prakash, inventor
of the foldscope, opines9 frugal science is about finding solutions
to problems that break the cost barrier - but a lot of intellectual rigor and
thinking goes into finding the right solutions. Equating jugaad with frugal
engineering, the type he pioneers in his lab, is frankly insulting and Dr. Prakash
states clearly that he “never really liked” the word jugaad. Similar examples
abound in the laboratory of Dr. George Whitesides at Harvard who invented
inexpensive paper microfluidics. Most celebrated frugal
innovations come from years or even decades of rigorous work and not from jugaad-based
short-cuts. This is why all the above examples of frugal innovations have risen
from the most distinguished labs in the world. The exacting requirements of rigor
and robustness are alien to jugaad.
We are a
young republic, a growing economic power, and most importantly an aspirational
society. Short term mercantile instincts should not stop us from treading the
right path forward. We cannot afford to make bad habits in our youth, for they
will eventually become disorders, deforming our adulthood. Let us pledge not to degenerate into the distorted
blunderland of jugaadism, but rise to honour our heritage of profound
thinkers.
Notes and
References:
1.We define
jugaadism as a systemic philosophy of sloppy, shallow and short-cutting techniques
of addressing complex problems.
2. Jugaadist
(adj/n) – A person or the condition of being afflicted with pathological jugaadism.
4.https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/large-parts-of-india-dotted-with-fires-nasa-images/articleshow/63965686.cms
6. Horn,
Granville Clide, Albert Eugene Dudeck, and Robert William Toler. "
Floratam" St. Augustinegrass: A Fast Growing New Variety for Ornamental
Turf, Resistant to St. Augustine Decline and Chinch Bugs. University of
Florida, Agricultural Experiment Station, 1973.
9. Paraphrased
from Private email
About the authors: Dr.
Ranajay Ghosh is currently an Assistant Professor at University of Central
Florida, Orlando (USA). He tweets at @ranajayghosh
Dr. Aloke Kumar is currently an Assistant Professor at
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He tweets at @aalokelab
Disclaimer: The
article expresses the personal opinion of the authors.
Update: This article was published with slight modifications by Swarajya Magazine. The link to that essay is here - https://swarajyamag.com/magazine/jugaadism-an-infantile-disorder
Update: This article was published with slight modifications by Swarajya Magazine. The link to that essay is here - https://swarajyamag.com/magazine/jugaadism-an-infantile-disorder
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