In 2007 I flew to India for DSM. My brief was to do field research among smallholder farmers — specifically, to validate a nutrition product meant to improve dairy yield. I had done my preparation. I had a questionnaire, a protocol, a tidy Excel to capture responses, and a local colleague who would interpret.
On the first morning, the Excel did not survive. Neither did the questionnaire.
What the farmers taught me, mostly by accident
The farmer I sat with lived about 120 kilometres east of Pune. He had two buffalo, roughly two acres, and three children. The interpreter dutifully put my first question into Marathi. The farmer answered, but the answer was not to my question — it was to the question he thought was actually worth answering.
I tried to steer back. He answered around it. I tried again. He politely answered something else. By the third question I realised the problem was not the farmer. The problem was me showing up with a European questionnaire and expecting an Indian farmer to re-arrange his reality to fit my form fields.
So we stopped. We drank chai. He showed me where the buffalo were tied, how the fodder was stacked, where the water came from (a hand pump, two fields over, which failed twice a week). He showed me a feed mixer he had built himself out of an oil drum, a cycle wheel, and some welded rebar. It worked. Not perfectly — but well enough, at about one-tenth the cost of the factory unit a competitor had pitched him that summer.
He called it jugaad.
What jugaad actually is (and is not)
Jugaad is often mistranslated as “hack” or “workaround”. That framing misses what makes it interesting. It is not corner-cutting. It is a posture toward constraints: if the ideal tool is not available, build a good-enough tool from what is. If the ideal data is not collectible, collect the data you can, and work out what it tells you. If the ideal answer is not within reach, move anyway.
It is also not romantic. Jugaad carries real costs — maintenance, safety, scale ceilings — and Indian engineers know this better than any outside commentator. But in a context where the formal system leaves gaps, the ability to move through those gaps is not a failure mode. It is a feature.
Why I still think about that morning
The version of me that flew to Pune in 2007 would have tried to fix the questionnaire. The version of me who walked back to the jeep had already started to suspect that the questionnaire was the wrong instrument.
Every European leadership team I work with, nearly two decades later, walks into India with a version of that questionnaire. Sometimes it is a go-to-market plan. Sometimes it is a partner-selection matrix. Sometimes it is a 90-day integration roadmap. Almost always the plan is well-built, internally coherent, and — in contact with actual Indian market conditions — partly or wholly wrong.
The plan is not useless. It is the starting shape. But what closes the gap between plan and outcome is the same posture the farmer showed me: see what is actually there, use what is actually available, adjust as you go, and do not confuse the map with the ground.
So what
If you are preparing a market-entry plan for India right now: do the plan. Make it sharp. Stress-test it with people who know the market. Then reserve a generous portion of your first ninety days on the ground for the plan to get taken apart, and a smaller portion for rebuilding it from what you actually find.
That posture — plan rigorously, adapt early, build with what is there — is what I mean when I say Orange Sherpa does not stay in base camp.
If this resonates, let’s talk.
