Jugaad in India's scientific community should be recognised
JUGAAD SHOULD BE INCLUDED IN THE POLICY AND RECOGNISED
INDIAN SCIENCE has a very distinct character which is based on the concept of jugaad or the art of using whatever is at hand to meet a need. This can be seen in the fatfat gaadi, a rickshaw fixed with motorcycle engine to reduce manual labour.
This is the kind of jugaad that Pankaj Sekhsaria has detailed in his book Instrumental Lives—An Intimate Biography of an Indian Laboratory. He has built the discussion around the making of a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM) and Scanning Force Microscope by C V Dharmadhikari, former head of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Materials Science and Solid State Physics of Savitribai Phule University in Pune. These microscopes were built using waste such as discarded computers, refrigerators and inkjet printers. One of the
microscopes was housed in a discarded refrigerator shell and the other in a plywood box. Dharmadhikari installed his first STM in 1986 under a staircase in the department in Pune. This was the same year that Heinrich Roehrer and Gerd Binning of IBM Research Laboratory in Zurich Switzerland received the Nobel Prize for capturing significant images from their STM in 1981.
In the true spirit of jugaad, Dharmadhikari would visit scrap yards and employ the services of all kinds of people with skills. These included workers at a roadside shop for aluminium sand-die-casting, practitioners of the traditional tin plating technique of kalai used to plate copper and brass utensils.
Dharmadhikari’s microscopes were used extensively by researchers from across the country—it is said that almost all the laboratories approached him at one time or another. These were people who wanted to see the nanoparticles they were working on or the structure of DNA. Many of these researchers came to him because commercial instruments were not able to provide the images needed. Dharmadhikari was willing to constantly tweak his machines to provide the images. But he was unambitious and was bogged down by the university system. This could explain why he never commercialised the instruments.
Sekhsaria identifies the lack of supporting policies as the major reason for jugaad not being given its due in India’s research scene. Technological jugaad and scientists who might use such methods have no part in Science Technology and Innovation Policy 2013 or in India Technology Vision 2035 and is generally tagged as “undesirable scientist”. But he posits that the Indian jugaad is equivalent to innovation in the West.
Sekhsaria makes his points well and provides a good insight into the psyche of lesser known scientists in India. It, however, is not an easy read. Sekhsaria depends extensively on quotes from interviews he conducted with researchers to substantiate the points and this breaks the flow.