Between two and four cubes can be loaded onto a truck. Ramesh Agarwal, of Agarwal Packers and Movers, says this cuts transport costs by a third.

LET’S HOP INTO DOCTOR WHO’S TARDIS, and travel back in time. It is 1993, a couple of years after finance minister Manmohan Singh opened up India’s economy. Coca-Cola has re-entered the country in a wave of foreign investment, cable television is breaking Doordarshan’s drab monopoly of broadcast media, and trucks have wooden bodies. Wooden trucks and televisions, transporters soon realised, are incompatible. Nails jutting out of the truck’s body often impaled televisions in transit. As demand for televisions rose, so did the number of clients returning their damaged sets. Around this time, young entrepreneur Ramesh Agarwal was making a name for himself in transporting household goods. He came up with a stop-gap solution in the trucking industry’s long tradition of jugaad, a Hindi word for getting things done.

“I made a basic change to the interiors by thickening the ply sheets on the floor and sides so that nails wouldn’t stick out. This reduced the damages significantly,” says Agarwal. Word spread that Agarwal Packers and Movers, a littleknown logistics company operating out of Hyderabad, had found a way to dramatically reduce transshipment losses. That’s how Agarwal acquired the appellation of “damage doctor”.