The last one year I’ve been reading up on public policy, and one of the most impressive ideas I’ve come across is something deceptively simple — Chesterton’s Fence.
The idea is this:
Don’t remove a fence unless you understand why it was put up.
It sounds obvious. But it hits differently once you start noticing how often we try to “fix” things without fully understanding them.
I had one such moment at work recently.
An old order under the Black Money Act had estimated interest income for earlier years — without access to bank statements. The approach? The department took the average balance for the available period and extrapolated backwards. At first glance, this struck me as arbitrary — and legally shaky.
How can you assume I had ₹100 in my account in 1990 just because I had ₹100 on average over the last five years?
And what about the time value of money?
₹100 today is not the same as ₹100 in 1990 — it could have been ₹10 back then.
I was all set to call it out. But before acting on instinct, I decided to understand why this was done.
As I dug deeper, I found something surprising: buried in the CBDT’s FAQs was a specific case — allowing this very method of estimation in the absence of reliable historical data.
What seemed like a bad call was actually a practical response to an impossible situation.
That was my own encounter with Chesterton’s Fence. The idea of seemingly impractical, illogical things actually solving a real problem is something I have been coming across very often ever since.
The order I’ve mentioned above wasn’t a careless shortcut — it was a legal, thought-through adaptation to a data gap.
Not everything old or inconvenient is outdated. Some rules are doing quiet work we don’t notice until we tear them down. The Indian idea of jugaad is a case in point — a seemingly nonsensical workaround that quietly solves a real problem. Take it away without understanding it, and the serpent raises its head again.
Have you ever tried to fix something — only to realise it existed for a reason?