Jugad beyond jest

There was a time when we were amused, even ashamed, of the Indian’s ability to improvise. Today, this is a skill that is winning admiration.
Are we always going to be the Land of Jugad—where quick-fix improvisations are used to tackle life’s hassles? The bigger question is how can we take this intrinsic ability to improvise and convert it into a national advantage. How do we take our attention away from small-time jugad to high-value and high-impact innovation?
In many ways, the last decade has seen the emergence of true innovation in India – in the business and social world. It is possibly the beginning of an innovative India where we are beginning to challenge existing legacies; an innovative India where Indian entities of MNCs are becoming a springboard for innovation and aren’t just clones of a distant parent; a changing India where social innovations are impacting education and poverty. Let’s look at how innovation in India has begun to happen.
Innovating Legacy Mindsets
Established industries are usually populated with old and rigid mindsets. These legacy attitudes cut across all players in the industry leading to a disease of sameness—everything, from products, packaging and promotions to advertising, looks the same.
Innovating in a legacy industry requires the courage to challenge and go beyond well-entrenched paradigms. This is very difficult in a hierarchical culture like ours. Take the 100–plus–year–old newspaper industry. Legacy mindsets in an old and established industry like this are huge, like the belief that it takes years to establish a leadership position. However, Dainik Bhaskar became market leader from Day1! A radical marketing strategy led them to become leaders on Day 1 in every city in Rajasthan, Chandigarh, Haryana and Gujarat.
Similarly, PHL (Premier Hockey League) brought breakthrough innovations into the traditional game of hockey. ESPN successfully collaborated with the Indian Hockey Federation to breathe new life into a decaying sport—it brought innovations into the game’s format, the teams and the telecast.
So if you want to change the rules of the game, the starting point is building a culture of challenge where superiors can be openly questioned without fear.
Innovating To Create Global Benchmarks
An organization in Madurai has innovated and already created global benchmarks: Aravind Eye Hospital. Aravind evolved an eye surgery technique that increased a surgeon’s productivity by a factor of 10. This business model ensures that millions of poor, visually—impaired people can be operated for free or nearly free, and that the hospital still makes 40 per cent operating profit. It does 200,000 cataract surgeries a year, making it the largest ophthalmology institution in the world. Further, students from Harvard and Johns Hopkins come here for exposure and training.
The best insight from Aravind is that ‘global benchmarks are a result of pursuing a great cause’. Chairman of Aravind Eye Hospital Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy’s cause was to eliminate ‘needless blindness’. Global benchmarks are created by pursing a big cause and not by just going after benchmarks. If an eye hospital in one of the quietest corners of India can become such a global lighthouse, what’s stopping the rest of us?
Beyond ‘Cloning Global Successes’
If Indian entities are to go from periphery to center stage, they need to stop acting like subjects of global empire. Innovation centered on markets happens when the driving force for the leader is ‘building market reputation’ rather than acceptance within the MNC.
Transforming ‘Sick Institutions’
What is your reaction when you have to engage with the police or a city corporation? Is it one of dread or hope? Sadly, it is one of dread and hopelessness. But even as the sickness of these two institutions that affect us on a daily basis deepens, there are examples of innovation that are a source of hope.
In Tiruchirapalli, J.K. Tripathy led the transformation of the police force from an image of ‘extortionist’ to ‘anna’ (elder brother). Subsequently, the crime rate dropped by 40 per cent —and that too in a communally-sensitive town. The source of this transformation was a paradigm-shifting observation: “Only 3 per cent of the people in a community are potential law breaker, 97 per cent are law-abiding citizens. Rather then adopt the traditional approach of law enforcement, which means going after the 3 per cent negative elements, how about using the 97 per cent good people to contain the negative?” This led to an innovative concept called ‘community policing’, wherein a group of four policemen took ownership for the law and order of a community. They won their trust by engaging with them proactively, and preventing law and order problems rather than merely reacting to them.
This transformation took less than two years and has sustained even after Tripathy was transferred. Tamil Nadu is now taking this concept to Chennai, Coimbatore and Madurai. Bureaucrats often hide behind myths like insufficient delegation of power, outmoded rules and regulation, and political interference. Tripathy demonstrated that the real issue is absence of leadership and the capacity to lead change.
Innovating To Educate India
Poverty is the barrier to education. As long as there is poverty, the poor will prefer to get their children to work and contribute to household income. So—poverty first, education second. This is conventional wisdom. Shanta Sinha and the MV Foundation (MVF) have pioneered a paradigm shift that ‘poverty is a result of lack of education. The poor will do anything to get their children educated. So—education first, poverty second.”
MVF has constructed an innovative movement around the new paradigm. Through its movement, it has been moving children out of bonded labour and into school to keep them there. Unlike small NGOs, this movement has impacted over 10 lakh children in the last decade. It is now being taken to Madhya Pradesh, Assam and Karnataka.
While Shanta Sinha has been working to get children back to school, Ekal Vidyalaya has been looking to create schools in places where none exist. It has reinvented the gurukul in the form of one–teacher schools in far–flung villages that are too remote and sparsely populated for the state to invest in.
The teacher is drawn from the village and trained by Ekal; the course material is also supplied by Ekal. The school is under a tree or in a common area provided by the village; the food is supplied by the community. The school timings vary as per the community’s needs—in the harvest season, the school shifts its timings. Ekal is a large-scale innovation: they have set up over 12,000 schools and intend to reach 1 lakh schools by 2012.
For any social innovation to be sustainable and scalable, it needs a movement of change in a community. More importantly, it needs a method to keep producing activists who can lead this change in different communities.
Innovating To Eliminate Poverty
Are you sick of hearing about poverty alleviation schemes that have never borne fruit? There is one that has had an effect. It is an initiative of the Kerala state government called Kudumbashree that has successfully impacted over 30 lakh high–risk families in over eight years.
Kudumbashree is a 100–person organization comprising officers seconded from other government organizations. Think about it: a mere 100–man government organization has impacted 30 lakh families. The entire intervention is a series of innovations starting from reframing the concept of poverty. Kudumbashree has reframed it as ‘levels of risk’—a family with low–income and old parents, or a family with an alcoholic is more at risk than a family with only low income. They then identify nine factors of risk and, therefore, needed to be focused on first.
Organizing the community into self-help groups (SHGs) was the prime driver of change, but the real innovation was leveraging local politicians at the panchayat level as facilitators. Most change initiatives make the mistake of creating parallel channels that circumvent the political channel instead of engaging and uplifting it. Enabling the transformation of SHGs into micro-enterprises is another innovation that has led to the creation of 48,000 micro enterprises ranging from computer education to managing urban waste.
The ‘Can’t Be Done In India’ Mindset
While India is getting branded for low-cost services, Reva, the electric car made in Bangalore, is breaking new ground and gaining acceptance in Europe. Reva has been a story of innovation overcoming the odds to beat the ‘can’t be done in India’ mindset.
Another example is that of Shantha Biotech – of how it developed the Hepatitis B vaccine in India. Reddy set out to create a Hepatitis vaccine in India. When he approached a firm in California for technology transfer, he was made to wait for three hours. Finally, when a gentleman did meet Reddy, he is believed to have told Reddy that: “Even if you could afford to pay for this technology, I doubt your scientists could absorb it – it’s too advanced.”
Reddy couldn’t tolerate this insult. He stormed out of that meeting saying: “I don’t need your technology. I will come back to you with a vaccine made in India in two years.” It took seven years, but he succeeded in making India only the fifth country to develop the vaccine. Looking back, Reddy says: “Leaders are supposed to be visionaries. I am not visionary; I just got provoked.” Isn’t it time more of us got provoked?
Nelson Mandela once reflected: “The problem is not that they think they are superior; the bigger problem is that we think we are inferior.” Jolting the Indian out of this deep-rooted subservience can unleash unprecedented innovation of the kind shown by Shantha Biotech and Reva.
-Rajiv Narang is CMD of
Erehwon Innovation Consulting.