A motley collection of home-built vehicles on India's roads shows there is more to their motoring than Tata, writes RAHUL BEDIin India
WHEN IT comes to innovation in transport, India is hoping to take centre stage with the recent arrival of the Tata Nano, heralded as the world’s cheapest car.
However the Tata is but the latest homegrown car to take to the roads of India. Motoring innovation is nothing new to the people of northern India, who have been creating their own motoring contraptions for decades.
For all the focus on India as a market for western and Asian brands, there is little to match the clutch of bizarre, locally-designed vehicles plying the roads across several northern and western Indian provinces, providing a critical lifeline for largely agrarian communities.
Defying all principles of automotive design, this motley collection of charabac-like vehicles ferry large quantities of farm produce, livestock and building material in several regions of adjoining Punjab and Haryana states in the north, and in the western provinces of Rajasthan and Gujarat.
Not only do are they act as industrial and agrarian workhorses – thousands of these smoke-belching road-runners, many of them operating with little in the way of brakes, double as rural taxis.
Their daily trips not only provide vital transport hundreds of school children, but cheaply convey scores of people packed in tight scrums from outlying villages to nearby towns. They also carry noisy, drunken revellers to and from marriages and mourners to funerals.
And though not formally recognised by respective provincial transport departments, local officials turn a blind eye to their existence as they are recognised as an essential, cheap and easily available service for rural folk in the absence of State-run transportation services.
In some Punjab villages the vehicles’ large wooden sides also serve as a blackboard for village children to practice their Punjabi and English alphabet during evening classes.
One such contraption, christened “Jugaad” (meaning “an innovative fix”), is little more than a motorised bullock cart costing around €145 (Rs50,000) that first surfaced in Punjab and Haryana in the early 1990s.
With every part created locally, from steering wheel to axle, Jugaads may not offer sleek looks but they are remarkably reliable and offer incredible flexibility in terms of cargo, provided no one is too concerned about their personal safety.
Jugaads are constructed by fitting locally available 10-14 horsepower diesel pump sets, normally used to draw up water from underground wells for irrigation. These are connected to steering wheels taken from abandoned jeeps or trucks using other similarly cannibalised parts. The entire contraption is then mounted on long wooden, trailer-like chassis on four wheels.
The juddering pump-set generates the power that spins a canvas fan belt which in turn works the camshaft attached to the rear wheels, rendering the contraption capable of moving at a dizzying speed of 45km/h on pitted village roads and dirt tracks with up to 40 people or a formidable load of grain aboard.
Most Jugaads – colourfully decorated, reflecting the local ethos and culture – have no shock absorbers, so it’s left to the occupant’s spine to soften the blows of rural India’s cavernously potholed highways. Over time, their amazing creators, the majority of them illiterate and operating from rudimentary workshops with little or no precision instrumentation or automation, have outfitted them with four-speed combination transmissions – three forward and one reverse – and radiators.
But for most Jugaads, brakes remain a problem, leading to them being banned in several states as they were responsible for causing disastrous crashes, particularly at railway crossings. The normal way for bringing a Jugaad to a halt is to switch off the engine or disengage the fan belt.
More “sophisticated” models adopted the reverse thrust principle used by aircraft.
In some instances the driver’s aide or one of the passengers was required to jump off the moving vehicle and deftly insert a log under the wheels to stop it.
But the Jugaad’s utility and folksy charm does not end even when off-road, as its engine is often harnessed upon arrival to run the tube-well, the fodder cutting machines, and to extract sugar cane juice for commercial sale.
A rugged Jugaad can provide a decent livelihood. Surjit Singh lives in Punjab’s Manuke village, 400km north of the federal capital New Delhi. Not only does he earn €4.31 (Rs300) a day – not an insignificant amount in rural India – by ferrying people, crops and cattle in his Jugaad. He also uses it to power his underground well at night, irrigating two hectares of land.
Along with this, he also deploys the engine to cut feed for his animals and even hooks it up to generate electricity at home during frequent power breakdowns.
“The Jugaads are an essential part of rural Punjab,” says Jagga Singh, a member of Manuke’s village council.
Their socio-economic significance is undeniable, he says, as they are not only inexpensive to build and economical to run but have the endurance of an “iron horse”.
The long-expected crackdown on using these vehicles on the public road has led to the arrival of yet another home-created vehicle, the Bhoond (wasp), a motorcycle-powered go-cart with three wheels, capable of transporting 8-10 people, or an equivalent load.
The specially-designed body with two wheels is attached to the motorcycle, normally a clapped-out and refurbished two-stroke 150cc motorcycle with a specially designed chain that works the entire contraption.
Costing around €1,000 (Rs70,000), the Bhoond averages around 70km per litre of petrol and is fast gaining popularity in the region’s Mand area as the principal form of transportation and in particular amongst taxi drivers. Fares range from €0.06 to €0.14 (Rs5-10) per ride.
Supplementing the Bhoond in Punjab is the smaller and cheaper Hero Panther motorised go-cart, pulled by a 60cc locally-made moped that gives its name to the contraption.
The Bhoond’s equivalent in Gujarat state, however, is the larger Chhakda, comprising a refurbished 350cc Royal Enfield motorcycle, attached to a festooned trailer go-cart which, being more powerful, can transport up to 30 people at one time.
Chhakda owner Narendra Patel says around 300 of them operated on the 30km stretch between Sanand and Nal Sarovar in Gujarat, near the state capital Gandhinager close to where Tata’s Nano, the world’s cheapest car, is being built. “It’s the most economical and easiest mode of transport available to the common citizen,” says Patel. “Such remarkable innovations exist in other parts of the world but the special factors in India are the availability of roadside mechanics and rural workshops and their fabrication skills,” explains Gupta of the National Innovation Foundation.