Jugād: Youth and Enterprise in India

This article examines the social and political significance of the Indian term jugād, which, crudely, means “make do and mend” or “find a way around”—for example, fixing a car fan belt with a pair of tights. Building on research conducted by Craig Jeffrey in 2004 and 2005 in western Uttar Pradesh, we show that a set of lower middle-class “fixers” has emerged among underemployed male youth in north India, who make large amounts of money acting as brokers between private educational entrepreneurs and universities and who use the idea of jugād to euphemize their involvement in corruption. We then employ more recent research, carried out between 2007 and 2012 by both authors, to show how the idea of jugād has gained traction among low castes (Dalits), who have also entered the world of local-level brokerage. In a rather extraordinary development, the Indian state has also picked up on jugād as a model for a distinctly Indian neoliberal development strategy. By adopting a critical Bourdieuian approach to analysis of young people's enterprise we provide a model for how scholars might investigate youth action, also highlighting the dangers of assuming that people on the ground straightforwardly parrot or reject neoliberal ideas.