Jugaad as the symbol of grassroots entrepreneurship and industriousness

 Gandhi’s dream of village industry  

A century later, Jugaad as the symbol of grassroots entrepreneurship and industriousness  

18 July 2025 

A century ago, Gandhi had called for a constructive programme to revive the sense of community in the villages. Cottage industries using local resources fulfilling local needs were a key part of this imagination.

 

The Jugaad today may be a living illustration of the depth of entrepreneurship and innovation at the grassroots, and the potential of the cottage industry in villages across India. It is also a reflection of the role of the state in stifling this vibrant culture in the informal interaction in the society. 

India may be one of the very few countries in the world today, where automobiles with internal combustion engines are manufactured by small entrepreneurs in rural areas for farmers and other small businesses. 

The Jugaad is a multipurpose vehicle for rural India used to carry agricultural produce, cattle, construction material, hired to transport local people and school children. Various attachments have been developed to drive the trolley as a dumper, run as a tractor to plough the field or harvest the crop, to crush sugarcane to make juices, etc. What a Jugaad can be made to do is constrained only by the limit of one’s imagination, which is why its utility is constantly expanding. 

Jugaad has had an organic growth, both quantitative and qualitative, and has been spreading geographically. And all that without any institutional or legal architecture. Truly grassroots innovation and entrepreneurship that could put many engineers to shame, in terms of entrepreneurship, adaptation, innovation and marketability, while tailoring the supply to meet personal preferences and priority of the customers.

Various versions of Jugaad, a low cost multipurpose vehicle for farmers are manufactured in small workshops in villages and small towns largely in Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. Farmers and small business owners from across India, Odisha in the east to Gujarat in the west, Himachal in the north to Karnataka in the south, come to buy these vehicles. These are custom built latest models, and there are a range of options available at different prices to suit a wide range of customers. The price varies as per the quality, features, and branded parts, from Rs 60,000 to 3.5 lakh. 

Here are a few examples from recent years 

Jugaad as multipurpose vehicle for farmers 

This Jugaad works as a truck, car and tractor, with a 8-12 hp diesel engine, it can give 20/25 km per litre. (Dubbed in English)

This is a pick-up truck with a capacity to carry 1 ton, or about 35 people.

 

This one is mini-truck, with a sugarcane juice maker as required by the buyer. (Dubbed in English with AI) 

 

Here is a mini-dumper on three wheels, comes even with a remote control to operate the trolley, manufactured in Bhilwara in Rajasthan. This one took just two days to manufacture this contraption and attach it to a motorcycle. 

This is a mini tractor assembled at home in Purnea in Bihar. 

Here are two models, one as a mini dumper, and other as a mobile shop, manufactured in Neemach district in Madhya Pradesh. 

A mobile sugarcane juice maker manufactured in Bikaner in Rajasthan. 

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The word Jugaad was originally used to describe these multipurpose rural vehicles assembled by enterprising local mechanics completely bypassing the laws and regulations, in the late 1980s, to the best of my knowledge. 

Today, Jugaad has acquired a life of its own far beyond its original scope, quite like Xerox which is a synonym for photocopying in India now. 

There have been various efforts to define or characterise Jugaad. Most of those look at Jugaad as a mindset to solve problems, or as a management outlook to problems. Some see it as a shortcut, a temporary step to deal with an immediate issue.  Others have sought to romanticise it as barefoot entrepreneurship. Still others think it is demeaning to use the term to describe such innovative and appropriate solutions.

I see Jugaad quite differently. I see it as a living illustration of the invisible hand of the market in the informal sector, outside or at the margins of the institutional and legal framework of the state. This is in sharp contrast to the continuous efforts to extinguish the  "invisible hand" in the formal market and make it visible through a maze of laws and regulations. 

Jugaad is not a nostalgia for the past, but a lived reality of India today, a perpetual struggle to avoid, escape or mitigate the heavy hand of the state, to find localised solutions for local problems. A space that recognises one’s agency, capacity, capability, and needs at the community  level.

Jugaad, therefore, could be seen as a way of the informal sector meeting the demand typically left unmet by the formal legalised and regulated sectors.

Jugaad seems to have become an assertion of one's identity with respect to a can-do attitude and outlook to their lived challenges. This is why so many of them are using the name Jugaad to promote their work.

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I like to use Jugaad as a classic example  highlighting the structural difference between the formal economic interactions under the umbrella of laws and institutions of the state, and informal but voluntary interactions based on reputation and relationships in society. The former typically raises transaction costs, creates artificial scarcities, and discriminates against those without access. The latter is a societal response from the grassroots to the imposition of a privileged structure patronised by the state institutions, while the overwhelming majority is left out. 

I have been following Jugaad for over three decades now. Personally, Jugaad has become a benchmark of the state of manufacturing in India. While a lot has changed in the last few decades, with many global and national brands manufacturing many models of automobile, trucks and tractors in India, and yet Jugaad has continued unchanged at one level meeting the unmet demands of many. 

In a sense, like Gandhi, jugaad seems to reflect the organic nature of socio-economic relationships at the grassroots, underscoring the significance of relationships and nurturing agency and independence, rather than relying on impersonal laws, depending on the state for enforcing regulations, and therefore surrendering one's agency, responsibility and the entrepreneurial spirit of service.

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My encounter with Jugaads on the ground in recent years. Although my first encounter was around 1990, when I was struck by the novelty and the underlying creativity that enabled people to integrate disparate pieces of new and old components, fabricate a few, and put a whole automobile on the road.

A farmer with his Jugaad in Sarangpur village in Fatehabad district, Haryana, about 50 kms from Delhi, in the summer of 2019.

An 8 HP diesel engine, typically used for irrigating agricultural fields, 

is commonly  mounted on a chassis to power the Jugaad.

There are a couple of smaller and cheaper versions of this vehicle, specifically designed for people

wanting to enter the mobile sugarcane juice business in the last few years. A couple with their

new born child on their newly purchased mobile sugarcane juice maker returning home,

on the highway outside Delhi on a cold morning in February 2020.

A Jugaad is also known as Chhakra in Gujarat. This mini truck is doubling up extracting fresh sugarcane juice, in Dharampur town, Valsad district, in Gujarat state. This one was built by village mechanics in Bhilwara district, Rajasthan. The on-road price then was of Rs 2 lakh, including the sugarcane juice maker, has a 8 hp engine, with 3+1 gearbox mounted on a chassis, inside a wooden body. Raju, a resident of Rajsamand in rural Mewar district in Rajasthan, purchased it and drove it over 650 km from his village to Dharampur, where he is in business since 2022. (Jan 1, 2025).