Jugaad meets AI: Why frugal thinking could decide the next tech race
Artificial intelligence is the most powerful technology the world has built in a generation. It is also, so far, almost entirely designed for the wrong people. The industry's default assumption is abundance. More computing power, more money, more data, more everything. The most advanced AI models cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and burn electricity that could power small cities. This is innovation engineered for people who already have everything, and it is being sold to a world where most people have very little. That contradiction is not a footnote to the AI story. It is the central problem that will determine whether this technology fulfils its promise or simply widens the gaps that already exist.
That gap is not new. It is the same one that frugal innovation has been quietly closing for decades. And if history is any guide, the country that masters frugal AI will not just serve the world's majority. It will lead the next technological era.
Frugal innovation is not about cutting corners. It is about starting from a completely different place. Instead of building something expensive and then trying to make it cheaper, you design from scratch with constraint as your guide. The goal is not a discount version of a luxury product. It is something better suited to the reality most people actually live in. The idea is not uniquely Indian, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. Kenya gave the world M-Pesa, a mobile banking system built for people without bank accounts, now studied in business schools globally. Brazil has its own word for it, gambiarra, the art of ingenious improvisation. Even Henry Ford, when he built the Model T, was practicing a version of this thinking: how do you make something powerful accessible to ordinary people?
But India has a particular claim to this space, and not just because of jugaad, the Hindi word that has quietly entered global business vocabulary. India's claim is one of scale, diversity, and a proven track record. The Jaipur Foot, a prosthetic limb that costs a fraction of its Western equivalent and lets users squat, walk on uneven terrain, and climb trees, is now exported to over twenty six countries. Aravind Eye Care performs world class cataract surgeries at almost no cost, using a system so efficient that Harvard professors fly to Madurai to study it. ISRO put a spacecraft in Mars orbit for less than the budget of the Hollywood film Gravity. India did not achieve these things despite its constraints. It achieved them because of them.
Here is the irony that should make every Indian optimist sit up straight. The most exciting frontier in global AI research right now is not bigger models or smarter chatbots. It is efficiency. After years of building systems that require enormous computing power and vast amounts of electricity, the industry is now desperately asking: can we do this smaller? Cheaper? Faster? Can AI run on a basic phone? Can it work without an internet connection? Can it speak in languages that are not English? This is jugaad thinking. Silicon Valley has simply arrived at it twenty years late.
India is already building in this space. Bhashini, the government backed language AI initiative, is working to make digital services accessible in dozens of Indian languages, because an AI that only speaks English is not really intelligent, it is merely privileged. Startups across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Chennai are building diagnostic tools for district hospitals, crop advisory systems for smallholder farmers, and voice first interfaces for users who have never typed a sentence in their lives. These are not poor substitutes for real AI. They are a different and for most of the world a far more relevant vision of what AI should actually be.
Having the right instinct, however, is not enough. For India to lead rather than simply participate, a few things need to change. Investment must flow into AI research rooted in Indian problems: climate resilience, multilingual education, rural healthcare, judicial backlog. These are not niche concerns. They are some of the most consequential unsolved problems on the planet, and India should be the country writing the solutions, not waiting to license them from abroad. The talent pipeline must stretch beyond IITs and metro cities, because the next breakthrough idea might come from a self-taught developer in Guwahati or an engineering college in Coimbatore that nobody has heard of. And regulation must be homegrown and inventive, not a copy paste of frameworks designed in Brussels or Washington, protecting citizens without strangling the innovation that makes frugal AI possible in the first place.
Every previous technology wave arrived in India on someone else's terms. We wrote the world's code during the IT boom, but the intellectual property belonged elsewhere. We became one of the world's largest internet markets, but the platforms were built in America and China. AI is different. For the first time, the very constraint
that held emerging economies back, the need to do more with less, to solve harder problems with fewer resources, is the defining skill of the moment.
Frugal innovation is not a consolation prize for countries that cannot afford the real thing. It never was. It is a philosophy, a discipline, and in the age of AI, a serious competitive advantage. The world does not need a smarter version of Silicon Valley's AI. It needs an AI that was built thinking of the majority first. That is the AI India should be building.
Author is a Assistant Professor, School of Business Management, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai PhD, IIM Ranchi; Views presented are personal.
