How Google team put India on Google Maps and made it better - When Jugaad came to the rescue

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Google Maps in India was a tough venture that was eventually rolled out successfully, but as with most things in the country, it required quite a bit of jugaad to get it into place. And no, we are not referring to the technology available, which at that time was the latest available. So, what did it take to roll out a reliable Google Maps? In the words of Elizabeth Laraki, alum at Google Maps, it took more than just rolling out to the designated area and mapping it as per the available signposts. Laraki ran into what then looked like an insurmountable problem, In a very long post on X, she said, "In 2008, Google Maps launched in India. But we quickly ran into a problem: Nobody used street names. And street names were the foundation of Google Maps."

In effect, what she and her team had to go through was to stray off the beaten path, so to speak, to ensure that the directions were spot on. She added in her X post, "The team had to make some big adaptations. 15 years later, the changes have stood the test of time."

Laraki revealed the process adopted that actually paid off handsomely. In effect, it was jugaad at its best. Here we let Laraki explain it in her own words, "Here's how the team came up with creative solutions to adapt Google Maps to work in India".

"When Google Maps launched in India, turn-by-turn directions were unusable.

Because there were no road names, directions looked like this:

Turn Left at NH 17 | 11.0km

Turn Left | 0.7km

Turn Left | 0.2km

Slight Left | 6.3km

This was before real-time, accurate GPS in phones had become mainstream.

In short, directions were pretty much useless in India.

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We could have left the product as it was.

We could have assumed it was good enough, would get better over time, or that