Eco India: Why India needs to revive its repair culture to curb e-waste

What reporter Siddharth Subramanian is going through has become a bit of a nightmare for all of us today. A phone that suddenly dies on us. I have come to Hercules. I'm told that this is the epicentre of India's repair economy. So let's go and find out what kind of an experience I have. As one of Asia's largest tech bazaars, here one can potentially service almost anything electronic. This is where all the repair happens in Hercules. There's somebody fixing keys over here. There are people getting their printers fixed. There are people getting their ink filled. And there's all kinds of mobile shops over here. And I have a phone that needs fixing. So let's go find out what we can get done. Abhimanyu Kumar Yadav is a second-generation technician. This is his eighth year at Nehru Place, he tells us. Every problem has a potential solution here. And it will cost you a fraction of what you would pay at an authorised centre. One of the reasons, reusing spare parts is common, either salvaged from old phones or made by third-party manufacturers. In a country that has historically thrived on principles of repair and reuse, markets like these are commonplace. An electronic repair hub can be found in almost every major city in India. And going by the crowd on any given day, there is little doubt over their popularity. Sagar spends about 10 hours every day in this room that is no more than 8 feet by 10 feet. He has been repairing laptops here for more than 20 years now. There is no safety gear in Sagar's shop. The infrastructure is bare minimal. Keeping operating costs down, Sagar reminds us, is intrinsic to the business. For decades, electronic markets like Nehru Place have thrived along with the livelihood of thousands because of a simple premise, the option for quick and inexpensive repair. That equation, not just in India but globally, is slowly changing. Not long ago, a dead phone battery meant a simple fix, opening the back cover and replacing it. Laptops came with replaceable RAM and hard drives or SSDs. A faulty component could be swapped or upgraded. But not anymore. Today, gadgets are made in ways that reduce their lifespan considerably. They are designed to be unrepairable, while upgrades are made more and more difficult. You will rarely find authorized spare parts. And even if you do, your gadget's design won't allow you to replace them. All this to push the agenda towards planned obsolescence, a calculated strategy that forces you to buy new, repeatedly and often. You look at the phone itself. Now the phone doesn't allow you even to change the battery. When the digital revolution started to happen, it became almost evident that there was a tendency for planned obsolescence. That is a strategy that the industry subtly adopts to push their goods into the market. It is at the design stage that many of these philosophies or concepts are actually embedded into thought process and that is how products are designed. A core design strategy in planned obsolescence is to make repair or replacement an expensive proposition, directly undermining what the repair industry has stood for over the decades. An average citizen in India changes their mobile phones every one to three years, research suggests. And this is consistent across the world. Similarly, earphones too, especially wireless, have a high obsolescence rate. In 2025 alone, more than 150 million smartphones were shipped into India. Taking the country's active smartphone base to over 740 million. The second largest in the world after China. So what really happens when a manufactured demand keeps growing astronomically and unchecked? It compounds an already existing e-waste crisis. It is becoming very, very critical that products are repaired and, you know, the life of a product is prolonged. I would say that it minimizes waste and it conserves resources. Between 2020 and 2024, India's e-waste generation went up by a whopping 73%. Globally, these kinds of concerns are being understood or they are being spoken by people. This whole conversation about circular economy and one of the key, you know, drivers for circular economy or key core is eco-design. One of the biggest one is certainly the C-type chargers. Every phone had a different charging device. And, you know, just two are not compatible to each other. Today, almost any phone is C-type charger. That's a huge shift that has happened. And that has also been pushed by people. Why should I be put to this inconvenience? And not only inconvenience, look at the kind of waste that it was generating. The need for a way out of the conundrum has lately given way to a few potential solutions. Among them is Cashify, a private company that offers to buy used phones, refurbish them and put them back into circulation. Everything has a secondary market in India where we are a very value conscious society where everything gets repaired. The only problem with these markets is they are highly fragmented. So you don't know what your local repair guy is using. When you come to us, we make sure that those parts are of good quality. I've gone through rigorous testing and they deliver value to you. There is a brand repair and then there is local authorized, unauthorized and then I think we are somewhere in the middle. Beyond the economy of repair, a growing community of thinkers, as they would like to call themselves, is working to bring back the simple habit of fixing things themselves. Bengaluru's Repair Cafe Collective is part of a global repair movement. And through pop-up workshops, training sessions and online groups, they nudge citizens to pick up basic repair skills. What we have seen is most of the equipment are quite simple to fix. Things like iron boxes, kettles, heaters, small gadgets and toys, serial lights for, you know, what we use for festivals and so on. Typically after one or two uses people end up, it doesn't work and then people end up throwing them away. So we're trying to see if we can avoid that, let people become completely self-sufficient in terms of managing all the gadgets at home. I got my headphones fixed. Mostly I don't tend to fix a lot of stuff by myself because right now everything is almost very instant because of your zepto, you know, or your blanket. So you get everything at instance. So there's no need to fix the broken items. But I think it's also very important for us to learn to, you know, fix the broken items to be able to reuse them. Changing how we repair also means changing how products are designed, sold and regulated. Globally, governments have started treating planned obsolescence as more than just consumer inconvenience. In 2015, France criminalized programmed obsolescence. The EU, meanwhile, has introduced rules that mandate specific manufacturers, including of smartphones and tablets, to make them more repairable and make spare parts more accessible. It should be my right to get a product repaired. I should be able to get my product repaired at my convenience, at my choice. And especially in a country like India, when I talk about it, we have had a huge culture of repair. Ironically, India offers its citizens no legal protection from the entrapment of planned obsolescence. There is no law enforcing the right to repair either. Although a framework has been underway since 2022. An idea that began as a consumer rights movement in the early 2000s, the right to repair is an enforceable law in many countries today. There have been many kinds of systems which are now coming up in other countries and I think there's a lot to learn. So one of the components is that repairability index. And I think that tells you that how repairable is this product? What are the chances of it making repair? When you're making the choice to buy it, you also know that how repairable is it. Back in Nehru place, Siddharth's phone is almost ready for use. But the experience leaves him with questions. For other people who would like to experiment themselves or they might want to come to a Nehru place and get a phone repaired, why can't I have access to original spares? I am willing to assume the risk. I'll get the phone repaired at a local shop. I'll trust their craftsmanship over a brand. But I want to at least be able to use an original part because not every repair needs a brand-authorized repair. I bought the device. The device is mine. It's no longer your part or your device to protect and earn more money from. As simple as that. India's repair economy has survived generations on the belief that anything broken deserves a second life. But as repair continues getting ambushed by an aggressive capitalist market, the question no longer is whether something is fixable. It is whether we still have the choice to fix it.