Jury-rigged is a key term used in the recent U.S. Department of Justice submission in a court in Maryland, claiming $100 million in damages from the owner and the manager of container ship Dali that collided into a bridge off Baltimore in March.
The Indian crew on Dali had carried out many jury-rigged, meaning makeshift or improvised, changes to machinery to tide over problems instead of deploying properly engineered solutions, the DoJ has submitted. Those changes allegedly led to the onboard blackouts that in turn led to the collision.
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We in India understand jury-rigged through another term – jugaad. It’s a term that denotes native ingenuity responding to lack of resources.
But cutting costs can often mean cutting corners and opting for cheaper, poorly engineered solutions with poor quality materials. Jugaad puts at risk lives and property.
India has always abounded in such improvs. Most Indians learn to make do with the little that they have. It has been the norm. Middle-class folk store empty milk sachets hoping to find some use for it.
Such clever improvisations help people tied over difficulties. They indicate poverty and lack of hard engineering knowledge too.
It may well be that the context behind jugaad has helped Indians innovate. But it is time to separate innovation and ingenuity from jugaad, as the DoJ submission has indicated. The two are different.
Misused and abused term
Writer Dinesh Sharma, author of the book “Indian Innovation, not Jugaad: 100 ideas that transformed India”, says jugaad is one of the most misused and abused terms in the present context of technology applications, innovation and startups. “Originally, it was meant to denote quick-fix solutions and short-cuts to pressing problems in a highly localised context. But the quick-fixes are not replicable. They are unsustainable and dangerous for users,” he says.
Jugaad gained repute, even awe, when management gurus from the West started using the term to denote low-cost or innovative ideas in marketing and business supply chains used by Indian firms. “Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth”, published nearly 15 years ago, was one such effort. In it the authors see jugaad as a mental attitude that seeks opportunity in adversity, does more with less, and keeps things simple. The jugaad practitioner follows his heart and thinks and acts flexibly.
Starting with describing a mud pot with a water dispenser as a low-cost fridge, the book details several innovations in the third world. Among the clever devices it discusses is a shock absorber in a bicycle that uses bumpy Indian roads to accelerate.
The original jugaadu was applied to contraptions of farmers in northern India that had engine-driven irrigation pumps, cannibalised gearboxes and steering wheels for rural transport. The jugaadu was a lot cheaper than a tractor. The ride can be bumpy and the jugaadu broke down often. Adding a dash of rural irony, the farmers called their contraption Maruta, punning on the small car Maruti.
In Chennai, poor folk fitted a crude engine on a tricycle and used it to carry vegetables, sometimes fish. It was mini-vandi (vehicle) and became meen body vandi (fishcart) later. The meen body vandi helped the poor vendors but they were a hazard on Chennai roads until the police intervened to regulate it.
Indians know that jugaad is a sly cop-out. The word jugaad is derogatory.
Jugaad has, however, become synonymous with a whole set of rigorous ideas called frugal engineering. Even genuine innovations is dubbed jugaad. “Equating low-cost, frugal innovations with jugaad is wrong and is grave injustice to innovators. I was shocked when some commentators termed ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission as jugaad because it used an innovative trajectory that optimally used rocket fuel and on-board fuel on the orbiter,” says Mr. Sharma.
Mr. Sharma’s book seeks to bust the myth that India is a land of jugaad . The book demonstrates that frugal, affordable and low-cost innovations can be replicable, sustainable, based on sound principles of science, design and social needs. “Innovation can be in policy, a social movement, and a pathbreaking marketing idea and so on. One hundred such ideas are listed in the book,” he says.
Lessons from Dali
The DoJ submission, which was a response to a limited liability claim by the owner and the manager of the vessel, carries several photographs from inside the ship. One showed a common ship device called the turnbuckle in which a nut rotates over a big screw carrying with it a metal frame. As the nut goes up and down the screw, the frame moves along with it, thus making the whole device become longer or shorter depending on which direction the nut rotates.
The turnbuckle is used to lash things on ship. It is attached to a piece of cargo on one side and the ship frame to another. As the seafarer rotates the nut, the turnbuckle becomes smaller and keeps the link taut.
Dali engineers had brought a turnbuckle inside the engine room where there were abnormal vibrations, apparently, and used the mechanism to tightly hold in place a transformer and welded it. This is like when you see something shaking, you put a metal rod between it and another strong point to crudely reduce the vibratory movements.
Apparently, the causes of the vibration were not addressed. Instead of properly engineered solutions such as vibration chocks and engineered changes in the machinery and the ship that would have cost much money, they welded the turnbuckle in to support the transformer.
The DoJ has alleged that out-of-control vibrations likely led to loose electrical cables and a blackout, which in turn triggered a cascade of events leading to the collision. The submission lists several such jury-rigging cases in the ship.
Indian seafarers have been preferred by foreign owners of ships for long. They can cut costs, keep things going with less, and make profits for their owners. But their engineering expertise is second to none. They can weld a turnbuckle to a transformer and the ship’s frame. They can also do detailed and highly complex vibration analysis and find the root cause of vibrations and engineer solutions.
Published - October 04, 2024 11:38 am IST
