Jugaad Infrastructure: Minor infrastructure and the messy aesthetics of everyday life

Abstract

Jugaad is an Indian name for versatility and improvisation, a sensibility for improvisation, an ability for improvisation and an enabling of improvisation. This paper proposes the idea of Jugaad Infrastructure for versatile socio-material infrastructure arrangements that inhabit and thrive in the messy aesthetics of everyday life. It does so by extending the focus of infrastructure geographies from ‘big stuff’ to little devices such as solar lamps that gain significance when deployed in big numbers. The paper advances two ideas. First, it argues that jugaad circumvents the formal–informal boundary set by designers. By piercing this boundary, jugaad affords more fluid socio-material relationships involving infrastructures and their users. In so doing, jugaad affords versatility. Second, it develops the idea of Jugaad Infrastructure. Jugaad Infrastructure folds two things into it. First, infrastructures that are designed in ways that facilitate jugaad, albeit within firmly maintained boundaries and attempt to capitalise on people's aptitude for jugaad to take different forms, inhabit different spaces, enable different purposes and all this while somewhat retaining their shape. They are easy to maintain. This helps them travel to, function and stay in different places. In this way, small devices spread around in large numbers to become big infrastructure. Second, it represents the ensembles of fluid socio-material relationships and resources involving infrastructures and their users through which infrastructures are tailored to ‘better’ fit everyday lives and needs. Jugaad Infrastructure inhabits the liminal spaces of struggle between designers claiming jugaad as a limited practice that leads to stable innovations and users deploying unlimited jugaadas an everyday practice of socio-material flux. The paper is based on qualitative research conducted in India during 2012–2013, 2016 and 2017 using participant observations, discussions and interviews with users, entrepreneurs, market players and designers, in addition to documentary evidence from reports and websites.