Abandon 'Jugaad' Approach, Stop Being Myopic: CEA's Advice To Indians

India needs to abandon the use of jugaad and develop medium-to-long term thinking in order to be recognised for quality of work, according to Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran.

"We need to abandon the recourse or the use of jugaad, it's a sub-optimal approach. We think we can make do in many things," he said, speaking at Assocham’s Bharat@100 Summit ‘Fuelling Bharat's Global Rise.

Jugaad refers to improvised or temporary solutions, and is commonly used in Hindi language.

"It's good to handle crises with innovative band-aid solutions, but (there is) lack of medium-to-long term thinking. We're myopic in our nature and that is reflected in our quality, (and) shortcuts that we take," he said. He gave an example of US giant Target terminating a large contract with an Indian manufacturer due to quality issues with the supplier's cotton.

Nageswaran urged Indians to think bigger. He quoted a former Indian badminton coach to say that Indians are easily satiated. "This is about sports, but we need ask ourselves whether this thing permeates into our business growth as well," he said.