In December 1964 a cyclone washed away parts of the Pamban bridge, the railway link between the mainland and the island of Rameswaram. The Railways allowed six months to restore it. E. Sreedharan was put in charge, and his superior cut the deadline to three months.
The bridge was back in 46 days. “The three month job of rebuilding a structure which connected Rameshwaram to the mainland was completed in 46 days,” The News Minute wrote. The Railway minister gave Sreedharan an award.
On July 30, 2024, landslides struck Mundakkai and Chooralmala in Wayanad, Kerala. Soldiers of the Madras Engineer Group began to build a 190-foot Bailey bridge between the two places at 9 a.m. on July 31. “The bridge was ready at 6 pm on August 1,” Onmanorama reported.
Reports differ on how long the work took. Onmanorama’s own times span 33 hours, but its headline said 31. The Week gave 36 hours, and other outlets gave shorter figures.
In April 2021, during the second wave of Covid-19, Indian Railways began to carry liquid medical oxygen. Road tankers were loaded onto flat wagons and run across the country as Oxygen Express trains. The first train with filled tankers reached Nashik in Maharashtra on April 24.
By June 8, 392 Oxygen Expresses had completed their journeys, the Press Information Bureau reported. They had carried 1,603 tankers and delivered “nearly 27600 MT of LMO.”
For India’s Mars Orbiter Mission, ISRO’s larger GSLV rocket was not available. “The GSLV failed twice in 2010 and still had issues with its cryogenic engine.” ISRO launched the spacecraft on the smaller PSLV instead. The PSLV could not send it directly toward Mars.
So the spacecraft stayed in orbit around Earth and fired its engine six times to raise its orbit. At the end of November 2013 it left Earth’s orbit for Mars.
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.
On July 11, 2006, bombs on Mumbai’s suburban trains killed 209 people. Western Railway restored services the same night. The next morning, “Mumbai woke up to suburban trains running as usual,” The Free Press Journal later recalled.
After a stampede at Elphinstone Road station in 2017, DNA wrote that the spirit of Mumbai, the city’s famed resilience, “unfortunately has become a cliche to justify official apathy.”
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 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.”
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.