Modi's Telangana Appeal Is Older Than It Sounds (AI-Generated) On Sunday in Telangana, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood before a public gathering and asked the country to do something Indians have, in various forms, been asked to do for centuries. "We have to reduce our use of petrol and diesel," he said. "In cities with metro lines, we should try to travel by metro. If we must use a car, then we should try to carpool." He went on to suggest a revival of Covid-era practices: work from home, online conferences, virtual meetings. The trigger was the Strait of Hormuz shutdown and the cascading pressure it has placed on India's fuel imports, foreign exchange reserves, and household budgets. The response Modi reached for, almost instinctively, was not new policy. It was old culture. India has a long, documented history of asking its citizens to do more with less. The vocabulary changes across centuries, but the instinct is the same. Also Read: Anga, Banga, Kalinga: How Three Ancient Regions Became A Modern Metaphor In 2026 The clearest modern articulation came from Mahatma Gandhi. In Hind Swaraj (1909) and across his decades of activism, Gandhi built the philosophy of swadeshi, the idea that true independence required not just political freedom but economic self-reliance rooted in local production, simple living, and the deliberate reduction of unnecessary wants. The charkha was its symbol. The Salt March of 1930 was its most theatrical demonstration: by making salt from seawater, Gandhi did not merely break a colonial law; he showed that Indians could produce their own necessities rather than pay tax on monopolised British goods. Khadi was not just cloth. It was a national curriculum in frugality. Mahatma Gandhi on the Salt March in 1930 (AI Generated) Gandhi insisted that self-reliance was not isolationism but dignity. He spoke of "cooperative self-reliance", regions specialising in their strengths, communities depending on each other without depending on imperial supply chains. The moral framework was as important as the economic one. Reducing unnecessary wants was treated as a form of inner strength, not as deprivation. If swadeshi was the philosophy, jugaad became the daily practice. The Hindustani word, now studied in business schools from Cambridge to Stanford, describes a uniquely Indian approach to problem-solving: improvisational, resource-light, rule-bending, ingenious. Academic research from the Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Contemporary South Asia, and Research-Technology Management has documented jugaad as a recognised form of frugal innovation, distinguished from Western models by its origin in scarcity rather than its application to scarcity. The 2012 bestseller 'Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth' by Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu and Simone Ahuja codified six principles drawn from Indian practice: seek opportunity in adversity, do more with less, think and act flexibly, keep it simple, include the margin, and follow your heart. Companies in Southeast Asia and Africa now study jugaad as a method for reducing research and development costs. India exported the idea before India officially named it. The instinct scales. The Indian Space Research Organisation's Chandrayaan-3 mission, which made India the first country to land near the lunar south pole in August 2023, has been described in academic management literature as a textbook case of frugal innovation. ISRO repurposed components from Chandrayaan-2, narrowed the mission's scope, and reportedly delivered the entire operation at a fraction of comparable missions by other space agencies. Brahmagupta's recognition of zero in 628 CE, and the wider Indian mathematical tradition of finding power in apparent emptiness, sit behind this instinct in ways scholars have begun to take seriously. Chandrayaan-3 Proved Frugal Innovation Can Still Reach the Moon (Picture Credit - Shutterstock) Modi's reference to Covid-era practices is not accidental. Between 2020 and 2022, Indian households absorbed a national experiment in compressed consumption: work from home, online education, virtual gatherings, and a sharp drop in discretionary travel. The lessons were uneven, and the costs were real, particularly for informal workers whose livelihoods depended on urban office economies. But the experiment showed that Indian society could reorganise its daily rhythms quickly when asked. Three reasons the do-more-with-less instinct remains relevant in 2026. First, India's energy import dependency is structural. The country imports roughly 85% of its crude oil, and the Hormuz chokepoint carries a significant share of that. Cultural reflexes that reduce demand, even at the margin, function as a buffer that no fiscal policy can replicate overnight. Second, the climate framing has shifted. What Gandhi called restraint and what Indian grandmothers call kifayat is now studied globally as sustainability. The Indian household that reus