Farmers in Punjab mounted irrigation pumps on trolley frames and called it transport.
Jugaad is a colloquial Hindi word that roughly translates as an improvised fix, a creative workaround assembled from whatever materials are available.1 The word traces to the Sanskrit root yuj, meaning to join or yoke together.2 In its most literal application, a jugaad is a motorized vehicle built from spare parts, typically a diesel irrigation pump mounted on a trolley chassis with motorcycle wheels, used as cheap rural transport across northern India.
The vehicles cost roughly 50,000 rupees and carry as many as twenty passengers at a time across unpaved roads.1 They have no formal safety features and no official road-worthiness certification. The Indian government has formally banned them, though enforcement remains inconsistent.
In 2012, the book Jugaad Innovation by Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, and Simone Ahuja reframed the concept for a global business audience, describing it as "frugal, flexible, and inclusive" problem-solving under severe resource constraints.3
Multinational corporations began studying the concept. GE Healthcare set up research facilities in India and developed low-cost medical devices for resource-constrained settings. Renault launched the Logan, a car designed to be affordable and robust, priced at 5,000 euros. Cambridge researchers tracked the global spread of what they termed "frugal innovation."4
Equivalent concepts exist across languages. In Brazil, the same improvised resourcefulness is called gambiarra. In China, the nearest equivalent is zizhu chuangxin, or self-reliant innovation.3 In each case, the word carries a dual valence, celebrated as creative ingenuity in some contexts and criticized as a symptom of absent infrastructure in others.