Beyond Jugaad: Can India Build Process Excellence?

There is a story that circulates in Indian manufacturing circles – possibly apocryphal, but instructive – about a shop floor supervisor who solved a persistent machine breakdown by wedging a folded cigarette packet under a vibrating component. It worked. For three years, it worked. Then a new manager arrived, standardized the maintenance checklist, and removed the cigarette packet. The machine broke down within a week.

This story captures something essential about India’s complicated relationship with process. We are a nation of extraordinary problem-solvers who are sometimes genuinely allergic to the systems that make solutions repeatable.

Jugaad – frugal innovation, the workaround, the improvised fix – has been celebrated, studied, and exported as a management philosophy. C.K. Prahalad wrote about the bottom of the pyramid. Western executives flew to India to study “reverse innovation.” And we, understandably, leaned into the narrative. But there is a version of this story that is less flattering: jugaad also means we tolerate broken systems because somebody clever will find a way around them. Redundancy quietly migrates from design into human effort. And when the clever person eventually leaves, the system collapses – because there was never really a system to begin with.

To be fair, improvisation earns its keep. During the pandemic, when supply chains were disrupted by the global health crisis, Indian hospitals and even small manufacturing units created makeshift ventilators and oxygen concentrators. That’s how the need for immediate action outweighed the pursuit of perfection. Jugaad is not the issue. It’s what we have not built.

Where India Has Already Done It

The evidence that India can build process discipline isn’t hypothetical. India’s pharmaceutical supplies nearly 20% of the world’s generic medicines. Companies like Sun Pharma and Cipla didn’t earn FDA approval through improvisation. They built GMP-compliant facilities, rigorous documentation cultures, and quality systems robust enough to serve the most regulated markets on earth. That transformation took decades of sustained, unglamorous discipline – nobody got promoted for writing a process manual – and it shows in every audit they clear.

The IT services industry tells a parallel story. Infosys and TCS weren’t able to expand their organizations with hundreds of thousands of employees by chance; rather, their success was based on CMMI processes and business models that have made Indian workforces as predictable as anyone else’s. The Indian aviation sector used to be plagued by unpredictability, but today runs on maintenance procedures and safety checklists.

The commonality between these industries isn’t a lack of creativity; rather, it’s how they integrated creativity into their systems.

The Uncomfortable Gap

Yet these remain exceptions. The processes of manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, and public infrastructure in India remain highly dependent on individual acts of heroism rather than institutional procedures. While one nation conducts missions to Mars, another is unable to audit the number of potholes repaired by its highway departments. Why?

The hurdles are just as much cultural as they are organizational. Too many managers see paperwork as synonymous with red tape and process as a straitjacket. Instead, good processes minimize uncertainty and provide the certainty required for true innovation to occur. It is precisely because Toyota’s processes remain so stable that it can learn from deviations from them. Stability, paradoxically, is what makes continuous change possible.

Fragmented accountability makes things worse.

What It Actually Takes

Moving from improvisation to systems thinking demands three things that are harder than they sound.

Organizations must first develop a tolerance for making problems visible. Jugaad works well in ambiguous situations, since the solution lies locally and need not be known elsewhere. In discipline, there must be precisely the reverse approach taken: A near miss must be handled as a form of information rather than as a relief to bring out the weakness. Secondly, success must be considered as an outcome of the system rather than the individual. Indian firms are highly personalistic, creating heroes but making the institution vulnerable. Thirdly, patience is essential for the leader. Maturity in processes comes slowly until suddenly you find yourself far ahead of your competition.

Technology will help immensely. The use of ERP systems, optimized routes, and analytics will eliminate dependence on personal decision-making and ensure visibility of results.

But, tools cannot create culture. The workforce entering India’s formal economy today – young, urban, ambitious – will work in organizations that can still be built from the ground up. Whether those organizations invest in process discipline or default to improvisation is, ultimately, a question of what leadership actually values, not what it says it values.

India’s ambition – a $5 trillion economy, a global manufacturing hub, a serious player in semiconductors and advanced services – cannot run on the cigarette-packet principle. The goal isn’t to kill jugaad. It’s to give it somewhere to land. The goal isn’t to kill jugaad. It’s to give it somewhere to land, isn’t it?

The cigarette packet bought three years. A proper maintenance system buys thirty.