My phone’s battery started swelling last month, and the fight to get it fixed became my own crash course in India’s right to repair problem. The manufacturer’s service centre wanted almost half the price of a new phone to fix it, and would not tell me why. Downstairs from that same mall, an independent repair shop did the job in twenty minutes for a third of the price, using a battery sourced through channels the brand does not officially recognise. That gap, between what a company will let you fix and what you are actually entitled to fix, is the real shape of India’s right to repair debate, and it is a debate India has not yet finished having.
In July 2022, India’s Department of Consumer Affairs, under the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, launched the Right to Repair portal. It was framed as a consumer-empowerment measure and a nudge toward a circular economy, covering four sectors: farming equipment, mobile phones and electronics, consumer durables, and automobiles. Officials in the department spoke of ending the era of “planned obsolescence,” where products are designed to fail just after warranties expire, and of building a public repository where consumers could check a company’s repair policy, warranty terms, and spare-parts availability before they bought.
India’s Right to Repair: A Portal, Not a Law
Here is the detail that gets lost in the announcement: the portal is a framework, not a statute. It aggregates disclosures that manufacturers voluntarily submit. There is no penalty clause for a company that lists incomplete repair information, and no legal obligation forcing a manufacturer to sell spare parts to independent shops at a fair price. Compare that to what the European Union and several American states have done, and the structural gap becomes obvious. India already has a track record with this exact pattern: our look at India’s Right to Service laws, twenty years on found mandated deadlines with almost no one enforcing them.
A portal that lists a company’s repair policy is not the same as a law that compels the company to change it.
Where the LiFE Mission Fits In
The Right to Repair push did not arrive in isolation. It followed Mission LiFE, Lifestyle for Environment, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in November 2021 and formally launched in India the following year. LiFE’s stated goal is to shift consumption away from a “use and dispose” culture toward habits that are deliberately more circular: repairing before replacing, reusing before discarding. Right to repair is the practical, product-level expression of that idea. A mission statement about mindful consumption means little if the country’s own repair ecosystem makes fixing a washing machine harder than buying a new one.
That is where the ambition and the mechanics start to pull apart. LiFE asks citizens to choose repair. The portal, as built, does not yet guarantee that repair is a real, affordable choice on the shelf next to replacement.
What Europe and America Did Differently
The European Union’s Right to Repair Directive, adopted in 2024, goes further than a disclosure portal. It requires manufacturers to offer repair services beyond the standard legal warranty period, to make spare parts and repair tools available at a reasonable price, and it discourages contractual and technical practices, such as parts pairing, that make independent repair artificially difficult. It is enforceable EU-wide law, not a voluntary listing.
The United States has no single federal right-to-repair law, but the state-by-state picture tells its own story. New York passed the Digital Fair Repair Act in 2022, the first law of its kind in the country, covering consumer electronics. Minnesota followed with a broader repair law in 2023. California’s SB 244, also 2023, set minimum repair-support periods tied to a product’s price. Colorado went further still, passing a right-to-repair law specifically for agricultural equipment, a direct response to farmers who could not fix their own tractors because of manufacturer software locks. Advocacy groups tracking the movement, including US PIRG, count more than a dozen states that have debated similar bills.
- EU: Binding directive, enforceable spare-parts and tool-access obligations.
- New York, Minnesota, California: State laws with defined repair-support periods.
- Colorado: Sector-specific law covering farm equipment.
- India: A voluntary disclosure portal across four sectors, with no penalty mechanism.
Why Manufacturers Push Back
It would be unfair to present this only as corporate obstruction. Manufacturers raise real concerns, even if some of those concerns also happen to protect their margins. Lithium-ion batteries mishandled by an untrained technician can catch fire; India’s consumer courts have seen cases blaming exactly that. Counterfeit parts are a genuine problem in a market as price-sensitive as India’s, and a company held liable for a device that fails after an unauthorised repair has a legitimate grievance about where responsibility should sit.
But some of the friction is harder to defend on safety grounds. Warranty terms that void coverage the moment a device is opened by anyone other than an authorised centre, software that flags a genuine but non-OEM-sourced replacement part as an error, glued-in batteries that are simply not designed to be removed: these are choices, not physical necessities. Apple’s own Self Service Repair programme, launched in the United States in 2022 under regulatory and public pressure, is an admission that at least some of that friction was avoidable. Industry bodies representing India’s electronics and mobile manufacturing sector have taken part in the portal’s stakeholder consultations, arguing for calibrated rules that protect intellectual property and safety standards without freezing out independent repair altogether. That is a negotiation still in progress, not one that has been settled.
The Farmer’s Tractor and the Kabadiwala’s Workshop
Right to repair sounds like an urban, gadget-owner’s concern, but its sharpest edge in India runs through the countryside. Farmers in Punjab and Haryana have relied on local mechanics to fix tractors and irrigation pumps for decades, not as a political statement but because authorised dealer networks are thin on the ground and a broken pump during sowing season cannot wait for a technician to arrive from the district town. That informal repair economy has functioned for years without any legal right to repair backing it. When it runs into a proprietary software lock, as American farmers famously did with John Deere equipment, a farmer with a stalled tractor and a ripening field has very little recourse.
India’s own repair economy is even larger and more informal on the electronics side. The country consistently ranks among the top three e-waste generators in the world, according to the UN’s Global E-waste Monitor, and a significant share of that repair and recycling work already happens outside any formal channel, in dense clusters such as Delhi’s Seelampur and similar markets in other cities. Thousands of workers strip, salvage, and rebuild devices by hand, often without protective equipment, because it is where the economics of broken electronics currently push them. A right to repair regime with real teeth would not create this workforce from nothing. It could, if designed carefully, pull more of that work into safer, regulated conditions instead of leaving it entirely informal.
The Economics of Repair Versus Replace
Ask any electronics repair technician in an Indian market why customers so often choose to replace rather than fix, and the answer is rarely sentimental. It is arithmetic. When an authorised service centre quotes a repair at sixty or seventy percent of a new device’s price, and financing schemes make that new device available for a few hundred rupees a month, the “rational” consumer choice tilts toward the landfill every time. Independent repairers can usually beat that price by a wide margin, precisely because they are not bound by the same parts contracts, labour overheads, or brand-mandated pricing floors. That price gap is not an accident of the market; it is shaped by decisions manufacturers make about how easy or expensive they let repair become.
India’s consumer courts have occasionally pushed back. District and state consumer disputes redressal commissions have, in a scattering of individual cases over the years, ruled against companies for unreasonable warranty denials or for refusing to service products still within their stated warranty window. But these are one-off victories won by individual complainants after months of proceedings, not a systemic fix. A right to repair law with defined obligations would shift that burden away from the consumer having to litigate case by case.
What Adoption Looks Like So Far
Three years on from launch, the portal has onboarded pages from a range of mobile, electronics, and consumer durable brands. But the quality of disclosure is uneven. Some listings amount to little more than warranty terms restated in a different format, rather than the spare-parts pricing, repair manuals, or component-level information that would let an independent technician or a determined consumer actually attempt a fix. Consumer-rights commentators have pointed out that without a compliance mechanism, there is no real cost to a company that treats the portal as a box-ticking exercise rather than a genuine transparency commitment.
This is not a case of the policy having failed. It is a case of the policy being, so far, exactly what it was built to be: a voluntary registry. It echoes a wider governance pattern this publication has traced before, where everyone wants the system fixed but nobody wants to queue for the compliance work that fixing it actually requires. Whether that is the right endpoint, or only a first step, is the question India has not answered.
The Question India Hasn’t Answered
India built the scaffolding for a right to repair before deciding what kind of house it wants to stand on that scaffolding. It can move toward the EU’s model, where obligations are written into law and backed by penalties, or the patchwork of American state statutes that at least gives consumers and independent repairers a legal claim to make. Or it can decide the current voluntary framework, refined and better enforced through public pressure and market competition rather than legislation, is the right fit for an economy with as much informal repair capacity as India already has.
My phone eventually got fixed at that shop downstairs, and it still works fine. But the next person with a swelling battery and a warranty sticker that says otherwise should not have to depend on finding the right shop by luck. Whether the state intends to turn that into a right, or leave it as a courtesy some companies choose to extend, is still an open question. India has not said which one it is building toward.