On March 30, 2020, the Railway Board ordered the conversion of passenger coaches into isolation coaches for Covid-19 patients. It planned 5,000 coaches at first and up to 20,000 in all. Only sleeper coaches without air conditioning were to be used.
In each cabin, both middle berths were to be removed. A toilet was to be turned into a bathing room. “Approximately 6500 hospital beds are being made ready,” The Tribune reported.
Dattatraya Lohar, a fabricator from Devrashtre in Sangli district, Maharashtra, built a four-wheeler from scrap and two-wheeler parts. In December 2021 the industrialist Anand Mahindra wrote about it on Twitter: “This clearly doesn’t meet with any of the regulations but I will never cease to admire the ingenuity.” He added: “I’ll personally offer him a Bolero in exchange.”
After the exchange, Mahindra wrote of Lohar’s vehicle: “It will be part of our collection of cars of all types at our Research Valley & should inspire us to be resourceful.”
On November 12, 2023, part of the Silkyara tunnel in Uttarakhand collapsed. Forty-one workers were trapped behind the rubble. An American auger machine drilled toward them, then ran into obstacles and stopped.
A company involved in the rescue approached Wakeel Hassan, who leads a team of rat-hole miners. Twelve men who specialized in rat-hole mining were flown in from Delhi. They cleared the last stretch by hand. All 41 workers were rescued on November 28.
In August 2018, floods covered large parts of Kerala. The state’s Fisheries Minister, J. Mercykutty Amma, said that fishermen in 669 mechanized country boats had rescued 65,000 people.
“We shared location information on WhatsApp,” one of them, Rony Thomas, told ThePrint.
In March 2020, during the Covid-19 lockdown, Aslam Chaudhury ran a kitchen for hungry workers from the mosque in Kalu Sarai, Delhi. It made 600 to 700 food packets a day. He needed cooking vessels. “The langar is shut, so I asked them if I could borrow their vessels,” he told The Caravan. The Gurdwara Shri Singh Sabha in the same village lent the vessels and sent two cooks.
In rural Punjab, a jugaad is a vehicle built from what is at hand. One kind bolts a farm trailer to a diesel engine of the kind that drives water pumps. Another, in Moga, fixes a 10 horsepower irrigation pump engine to the front of a wooden cart. It carries about 40 people.
The word means a workaround. In 2017 the Oxford English Dictionary added it: “A flexible approach to problem-solving that uses limited resources in an innovative way.”
On November 21, 1963, India launched its first rocket, an American-made Nike-Apache, from Thumba, a coastal village in Kerala. The scientists worked out of a church. Its prayer hall became the first laboratory, and the bishop’s house became the office.
Rocket parts and payloads were carried to the launch pad by bullock cart and by bicycle.
In 1968 the sculptor Ram Chandra Sharma met the orthopedic surgeon P.K. Sethi. Together they reworked an existing Western artificial foot with local materials such as vulcanized rubber. Early versions cost less than five dollars to make.
The organization that fits the Jaipur Foot, founded in 1975, has since rehabilitated more than 2.3 million people, mostly free of charge.
After the Gujarat earthquake of 2001, the potter Mansukhbhai Prajapati read a newspaper caption: Garibi ka fridge tut gaya. The fridge of the poor has broken.
He built a refrigerator out of clay. Called MittiCool, it needs no electricity and costs nothing to run.
In 3 Idiots (2009), a storm floods the city and cuts the power, and Mona goes into labor. The engineering students rig up a power supply and turn a vacuum cleaner into a suction device to deliver the baby. They are guided over a webcam.