Jugaad is improvisation: making something work with what is available rather than with what is specified.
In Punjab and Haryana the word also names a specific object, a vehicle assembled from a diesel irrigation pump engine, a truck axle, and a wooden or steel frame, used to carry goods and people on rural roads. They are unregistered, untaxed, uninsured and everywhere.
The engine is a Lister-type stationary diesel of a design from the 1930s, still manufactured, and it is the same engine that runs tubewells, chaff cutters and flour mills. A whole rural mechanical economy is built on one obsolete British engine design.
Jugaad has been celebrated in business writing as frugal innovation. In Punjab it is what people do because the proper thing is unaffordable, and the vehicles kill people regularly.
The word has gone into Indian English and now into management vocabulary, several removes from a man welding a pump engine onto a cart axle in a workshop at Doraha.
The Supreme Court of India has ordered these vehicles off the roads and state governments have announced bans more than once. They are still built, because the alternative is a tractor and trolley at several times the price or no transport at all, and the enforcement stops at the edge of the first village.
The same word covers the tubewell run off a tractor's power take off, the cooler built from a pump and a truck radiator, the phone charged from a solar panel wired to a car battery, and every repair that puts a part from one machine into another. What it names is diagnosis rather than manufacture.
None of it is written down. Nothing is drawn, nothing is patented, and a fitter who works out a better arrangement passes it on by being copied by the shop across the road. It is the largest body of undocumented engineering in the state and there is no record of any of it anywhere.