FOR close to a decade I worked on a farm at the end of a dirt road that was home to an NGO called Aprovecho (www.aprovecho.com). It was in Oregon, tucked into the cool, wet northwest corner of the United States. We grew our own food, raised goats, built houses out of wood from the forest, drank water from a gravity-fed spring, and were fairly sure we were on to a transformative way of living based on voluntary simplicity. It was isolated in some ways, but our work – developing efficient, wood-burning cook stoves – including one called a Rocket Stove, reached far out into the world, finding its way to distant locales in Central America, Africa, and India. To make a Rocket Stove, in its most elemental form, all one needed was two large coffee cans, a couple small soup cans, and a pair of tin snips. We would test for efficiency by metering out ounces of wood until a simmering pound of beans was soft.

Like half of humanity today, I left my rural outpost for the city, but Aprovecho remains. Its name derives from a Spanish word we translated as ‘I make best use of.’ There is no real equivalent in the English language. ‘To take advantage of’ is the closest our American English gets, and that phrase has a decidedly negative connotation. What about the good and creative ways to make do?

My father is from India and every few years on a return visit to see my extended family in Chennai, I would witness a place where people knew how to make do. If necessity is the mother of invention, then Indians are her midwives. I learned the Hindi word jugaad, a slippery untranslatable word that means something akin to resourceful or innovative, make-shift or jury-rigged. It’s a noun, too, the name of the haphazard vehicles that ply the roads of Haryana and Punjab, Mad Max mobiles pieced together with a motley collection of boards, machine parts, and jeep fragments, powered by well pumps pulled from the local farms.

A couple years ago, an exhibition, ‘Jugaad Urbanism: Resourceful Strategies for Indian Cities’, brought a sampling of Indian innovations to the Center for Architecture at the heart of Greenwich Village in the gleaming metropolis of New York City. The exhibit focused on the four Indian cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Pune, and four critical natural resources: water, energy, transportation, and land. The colourful, almost playful, exhibit offered examples of how designers, architects, artists, and activists responded to a widespread lack of basic amenities in India. There was the Envirofit, a sleek adaptation of the Rocket Stove, built with the same design principles we’d experimented with back in Oregon. There were hand-powered spinning wheels that generated electricity for a small light and transistor radio, elaborate street chandeliers made out of plastic bottles and LED lights, composting toilets that separated liquids from solids, and solar powered rickshaws. There were also architectural renderings and models for low income housing and video installations of perhaps the world’s first-ever Toilet Festival. ‘The sheer impossibility of the Indian city is completely subverted by jugaad,’ curator Kanu Agrawal told me.

 

In my frequent trips to India over the years, I have witnessed this ‘sheer impossibility’, as well as its subversion. I have been astounded by the hurtling advancements I see on each subsequent visit, but equally astonished by how much some things seem to stay exactly the same. Soon the roadside chaiwalla stands on Chennai’s shiny new IT Corridor will have wireless service, but there will still be someone pissing in an open ditch next to one.

Because where else is there to go? India may be a rising power of the East, but half of Indian homes have no indoor toilet.¹ Sixty per cent of its population has no access to clean water. Four hundred million Indians have no electricity, and all are accustomed to daily power cuts. There are people everywhere, over a billion and counting, a newborn howling its way into a world of want each and every second. Yet somehow, for the most part, it works.

 

The Jugaad Urbanism show was about how it might work better, not only in South Asia but also in the western world of abundance, where clean water and steady power are taken for granted, but where astronomical consumption of resources is leading to a dead-end path to unsustainability. The exhibit was about how to unearth the lessons pieced together with bits of wire and ingenuity to make a new world. ‘The hyperbolic expansion of cities is rife with opportunities for urban design,’ said Agrawal, his eyes intent behind dark-rimmed glasses even as his soft demeanour revealed him as the mild-mannered, Yale-trained architect that he is. ‘Within the multilayered urbanism there are whole complex systems.’ He described these systems as urban morphologies.

In the name of progress, some of these morphologies are being dismantled. Resettlement plans might demolish a rat-infested shanty town like Mumbai’s Dharavi, where there is only one toilet per few hundred people, but when it offers concrete block structures forty miles from the city centre, with no jobs and no transportation, the ‘plan’ in city planning evaporates. Agrawal described one of these relocation developments – which had abundant electricity but zero water infrastructure – as a ‘relentless grid without any idea about how people live.’ He also pointed out that places like slums are sometimes the most productive parts of a city, its citizens the recyclers and producers of a vast array of materials and products. Jim Yardley of The New York Times described it as a ‘churning hive of workshops with an annual economic output estimated to be $600 million to more than $1 billion.’²

Agrawal stated the same. ‘Mumbai is made in Dharavi,’ he said. ‘If you remove it, there will be a huge economic vacuum.’

Is there a way to develop without destroying? It is a question being asked from Brooklyn to Bangalore. One Pune project highlighted a building-by-building in situ renovation plan that keeps the structure of the slum – officially called an ‘informal settlement’ – fundamentally intact, while making it safer and healthier for its inhabitants with new buildings. Adaptable design allows for expanding families, small businesses, and animal husbandry, all critical elements of making a ‘jugaad’ lifestyle work. A few thousand homeowners contributed 10 per cent of the cost, either through cash, labour, or supplies, and the government provided an additional subsidy.

 

It was a start, but Pune is a city of 4.5 million people. Nearly half live in these ‘informal settlements’, a name that makes Vyjayanthi Rao recoil. Rao is an anthropology professor at The New School for Social Research and co-director of Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research (Pukar), a Mumbai NGO and conceptual laboratory for ideas about globalization and urbanization. ‘What we are trying to grapple with is the notion of the informal,’ she said. ‘It is extremely misleading. One should call it the "actually existing urbanism" of India, because the formal doesn’t really exist.’ Everything, she was basically saying, is jugaad.

Alexander Keefe, an American journalist who lives on and off in India and has a blog called Jugaad, agrees. He sees Indians negotiating every relationship they have: with their resources, with each other, with the state. He expanded on the word for me: ‘It’s often used with the verb karna, to make. Like, make an arrangement, make a quick fix.’ It’s all temporary, and it’s all makeshift. He paused, then stressed, ‘What it does not mean is to come up with a brilliant solution to India’s energy problems.’

His point is that Indians make do because they have to make do. If social and economic systems are functioning, you don’t need jugaad, at least not everywhere, all the time. So the question is, do you celebrate the improvisational world? ‘Yes, places like Dharavi are economically clever,’ Keefe said, ‘but there’s no equity, no environmental or labour protections. It’s not necessarily a world we want to strive for.’

 

Even Agrawal admitted that there was a ‘boutique’ element to much of the show. He hung his head in disappointment when he said it, wishing that the government would make a bigger commitment. ‘I visited every project in this exhibition, but many of these efforts are stifled by corruption and inertia.’ The Indian government ‘should be using democracy in a more powerful way,’ he said ruefully. Likewise, it remains to be seen whether India’s fast rising middle class is even considering these issues in its rush into a globalized world economy and culture.

‘Shortage of resources is a global phenomenon,’ said Agrawal. ‘We take so much for granted [in the West].’ His hope for the show is not that India leaps into an eco-revolution with composting toilets and solar powered lights in every home, though I’m sure he wouldn’t object if that happened. His hope instead is that an exhibition like this, shown in the developed world, encourages designers to think about how to put their skills to use and inspires people everywhere to share limited resources more graciously.

While I’m generally delighted by the idea of collaboration and cultural cross-pollination in everything from design to diet, I somehow wanted to see fewer western names affiliated with the projects in Jugaad Urbanism. And it was disappointing to learn that there was still no certain plan to have the exhibit shown in India. This is not for lack of desire on the part of the organizers, but simply a question of funding. Which brings us right back to the root of the problem: resources. Who has them? Where are they allocated? What is prioritized? If there is not enough interest on the part of India, in all its vastness, to even support the dissemination of these creative responses to the fundamental issue of lack, then how will these ideas – spinning wheels that make electricity and thread! smokeless wood-burning stoves! – ever gain the widespread traction they need in order to make a substantive change?

 

The efforts of the collectives and designers and artists and utopians at work in the Jugaad Urbanism exhibition might not yet be transforming the fundamentally chaotic structure of India, but they are undoubtedly improving a vast number of consumer lives. And who knows where that grassroots work may lead? There is always a fringe, an underground, a resistance made up of Margaret Mead’s coven of the committed. What fortuitous component makes these human longings for equality, justice, and a voice take root and turn into a movement – even a revolution? Answers are elusive, but hope lies in the fact that it happens. Something rises from the ranks, emerging from the ground like cicadas after a long sleep.

 

* Meera Subramanian is a US-based journalist who writes about culture, conservation, and the environment for newspapers and magazines around the world. She is currently working on a book about environmental issues in India.

** A version of this piece appeared in Orion magazine.

Footnotes:

1. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/half-of-indias-homes-have-cellphones-but-not-toilets/article2992061.ece

2. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/world/asia/in-indian-slum-misery-work-politics-and-hope.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0