How Hindujas moved truckloads of potatoes, onions to Iran via Pakistan
Chennai: Gopichand Hinduja, one of the brothers who run the vast Hinduja group’s industrial and financial ventures, is only interested in what is possible. The entrepreneur in his view will always find “some ways and means” to accomplish a given task. “He will find some window or find a way to fix the door.”
Old-timers may know that Hindujas’ business was earlier headquartered in Iran. But not many perhaps may have read of the Hindujas going to the Shah of Iran’s help in the early 1970s with huge supplies of potatoes and onions from Punjab fields when a booming Iranian economy, riding on rising global oil prices, badly needed them as its food economy faced a crisis amid their most congested ports.
The Shah “called the Hindujas because they had acquired a reputation for getting difficult things done and finding solutions where others scratched their heads,” writes Dean Nelson, former foreign correspondent in Delhi and covering India and South Asia for ‘Sunday Times’ and ‘Daily Telegraph’, narrating this amazing episode in his recent book, ‘Jugaad Yatra – Exploring the Indian Art of Problem Solving‘.
It was not long after “Indira Gandhi’s army had inflicted a humiliating defeat on Pakistan’s forces in the 1971 war,” recalls Nelson. But when Shah’s commerce minister, Fereidoun Mahdavi asked the Hindujas to find a solution to the soaring potato and onion prices in Iran by “filling each and every town and city of Iran with potatoes and onions”, the Hinduja brothers took up the challenge.
Gopichand and his elder brother Srichand, from newspaper reports then gleaned that there was a glut of potatoes and onions in Amritsar and Jalandhar markets and all they needed to do was to “buy the glut in Punjab, transport it 1,200 kilometres through Pakistan to Zahedan, just over its border in Iranian Baluchistan, and from there to local markets to bring the prices down,” writes Nelson.
They only needed Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s nod as no Indian trucks had been allowed on Pakistan’s roads since the 1947 partition of India. But that end was managed by Iran as they had good ties with Pakistan and the latter even agreed to one-time passage of the trucks.
The rider, though, was that the Hindujas had to find “non-Indian nationals to drive them”. Suddenly some 1,400 non-Indian drivers had to be found from around the World. To avoid the consignment getting stranded at the Wagah border, the Hindujas contacted International agencies to find them. “Many of the drivers were flown in from Seoul in South Korea and in just three weeks, they had assembled an army of truckers to come to the Shah’s rescue,” writes Nelson.
This massive logistical exercise of moving potatoes and onions by road worked and it helped stabilise the prices in Iran once they reached the markets there, the author quotes Gopichand Hinduja having explained to him. “Just as K.K. Modi’s sugarcane factory manager had promised to deliver milk for his family’s wedding without knowing how, the Hindujas had given their word to the Shah that they would supply onions and potatoes and once given, it had to be honoured, whatever it took,” Nelson summarises that episode thus.
State authorities, professionals and technocrats might have looked at this issue entirely differently, but the point that Nelson seeks to drive through several such stories in much of this 155-page lovely read, a reflective travelogue through the terrain of the Indian art of problem solving the hallmark of India’s genius for decades – captured by the omnibus word ‘Jugaad’ - is that there is a humanism even in crisis management.
“The practitioner of jugaadism works around the problem, doesn’t take no for an answer and draws on willpower and lateral thinking to solve or bypass it,” elaborates Nelson based on his interactions with a several personalities involved with different kinds of “innovations”, or what some would call ‘quick-fix solutions’.
As Dean Nelson says, his journey began tracking the “frugal home invention like octogenarian M B Lal whose Snowbreeze air cooler offers affordable cooling to India’s poor,” or more recently the invention of an Arunachalam Muruganantham, a social entrepreneur from Tamil Nadu who ingeniously came up with a low-cost sanitary napkin for the rural womenfolk in particular.
There is a quirky side to this phenomenon too when the push for quick-fix and ‘shoddy’ solutions to problems also spawns inefficiency and corruption. The author draws quite a bit from the Commonwealth Games scam in this regard, which was quite an embarrassment to India while hosting this prestigious event in New Delhi.
The issue is not just about low-cost, desi, home-grown solutions that could tap into the market psychology of the middle, the lower middle and the poorer classes who still form the bulk of India’s population. At an ideological level it peaks towards what the former BJP ideologue Govindacharya would call “total rejection” of Western materialism and their life-styles to foster a new ‘Swadeshi’ in India that fits in well with the rise of right-of-centre Hindu nationalism.
However, as the author points out, there are major rejections of India’s ‘Jugaadism’ too. A successful industrialist like Anand Mahindra wants none of such short-cuts, but hard, science and technology-driven original and innovative research projects that have already put India on the global automobile map. So too is a non-nonsense person like former Union Environment minister, Prof Jayaram Ramesh, who sees a real danger in ‘Jugaadism’ encouraging a “culture of non-compliance” particularly with regard to Environmental regulations.
The ‘Chalta Hai’ (anything goes) attitude will not do for the ‘New India’ of the 21st century, what with the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Make in India’ initiative, scaling to ambitious heights of putting a manned mission in space, as detailed in his latest Independence Day Address. The Indian Space Research Organsiation (ISRO) symbolises India’s inherent capacity for S and T success, which is no ‘Jugaadism’.
This debate might go on, but at the end of the day the journalist in Dean Nelson is very realistic. Whether India would follow Modi’s ‘Mangalyaan map’ or take another bypass road instead, “the Jugaad Yatra marches on”.
