In April 2021, as Covid-19 patients in Ghaziabad failed to secure hospital beds, the gurdwara in Indirapuram began to give them oxygen. The initiative began on April 23. The NGO Khalsa Help International led it. Langar is the word for the community kitchen of a gurdwara.
ThePrint reported that the oxygen langar was helping at least 400 people every day. Patients received oxygen “till hospital bed is not allotted to him or her,” The Tribune reported.
On September 28, 2022, the Punjab and Haryana High Court ordered the authorities in Haryana to act against jugaad vehicles plying in violation of the Motor Vehicles Act. The order included impounding them. The Tribune reported it as action against “illegal and dangerously modified” vehicles.
In 2025 the same court heard an accident claim involving “a ‘jugaad’ vehicle (car without registration),” LiveLaw reported.
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 Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006), directed by Dibakar Banerjee, Kamal Khosla spends his savings on a plot of land in South Delhi. A builder, Khurana, has it taken over by squatters. The family appeals to the police, lawyers, ministers and social workers, and gets nowhere.
Friends then plan a con. A theater group plays an industrialist from Dubai with land to sell. Khurana pays an advance in cash, and the Khoslas use his money to pay him off.
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.