The Right to Repair must Include the Right to Remember

In May 2025, the Indian government accepted a report proposing a Repairability Index for mobile phones and appliances, ranking products based on ease of repair, spare part access, and software support. 

• New e-waste policies now include minimum payments to incentivise formal recycling.

About Right to Repair

• Right to Repair ensures that products are designed for repairability, with accessible spare parts and repair manuals. 
• Companies are increasingly designing products with glued parts or proprietary screws, making independent repair difficult and compelling consumers to buy new items or use expensive authorised services. 
• Global Movement for Right to Repair: The European Union recently introduced rules requiring manufacturers to provide access to spare parts and repair documentation. 
• In India, the Department of Consumer Affairs launched a Right to Repair framework in 2022, followed by a national portal in 2023 covering electronics, automobiles, and farm equipment. 
• The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12 promotes repair as part of responsible consumption. 
• India now has the opportunity to lead by recognising repair not just as a service but also as a form of knowledge work.

Recognition of Tacit Knowledge

• Tacit knowledge refers to forms of skill and intuition that are difficult to formalise. 
• In India’s repair economy, this expertise is typically passed down through mentorship, observation, and repetition — not through formal training or certification. 
• It is inherently adaptive and context-sensitive, qualities that structured digital systems, including AI, often struggle to replicate. 
  • Example: In places like Delhi’s Karol Bagh, Chennai’s Ritchie Street, and Mumbai’s Lamington Road, where skilled technicians perform “reverse engineering” – understanding devices by disassembling them, reusing old parts etc.
• Challenge in Recognition of Tacit Knowledge: As AI advances, it increasingly draws on insights shaped by this kind of labour. 
  • However, mechanisms to acknowledge or equitably involve the contributors of this knowledge are still evolving. 
  • The result is a growing imbalance: AI systems continue to improve, while the communities enabling that learning often remain unrecognised.

Benefits of Prioritising Repair and Tacit Knowledge

• Environmental Sustainability: India is the world’s third-largest e-waste producer, generating over 1.6 million tonnes in 2021-22. 
  • Repair extends product life, reduces e-waste, and significantly lessens environmental burden.
• Economic Advantage: It saves money for consumers, promotes a circular economy, and generates local employment opportunities.
  • A circular economy is an economic model aimed at eliminating waste and continually reusing resources. 
  • It focuses on reducing, reusing, recycling, and regenerating products and materials to extend their life cycle and reduce environmental impact.
• Social Equity: Repairers often reuse parts and revive products that companies deem “dead,” providing affordable solutions, especially for economically disadvantaged populations.
• Innovation through ‘Unmaking’: Repair is a form of ‘unmaking’ – the process of disassembling, understanding, and repurposing devices. 
  • This reveals design flaws and opportunities for reuse, transforming breakdowns into valuable feedback loops and sources of practical insight. 
  • A discarded circuit board can become a teaching tool, and salvaged parts can restore access to work or school.

Challenges to India’s Repair Ecosystem

• Product Design: Modern gadgets are increasingly built for compactness and control, not for repair. 
  • A 2023 iFixit global report indicated that only 23% of smartphones sold in Asia are easily repairable due to design constraints.
• Consumer Behaviour: Increased disposable income encourages consumers to quickly replace broken products rather than repair them.
• Lack of Formal Recognition: Informal repairers often lack skill certificates or formal recognition, hindering their access to formal markets, skilling programmes, and policy attention.
• Policy Gaps: Past government policies, such as the 2022 E-Waste Management Rules, have primarily focused on recycling with only passing mention of repair as a preventive strategy.
  • National skilling programmes like PMKVY often do not accommodate the improvisational and diagnostic nature of repair work. 
  • Similarly, while the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 celebrates Indian knowledge traditions, it offers limited guidance on supporting hands-on repair expertise.

Recommendations for Policy and Implementation

For India to truly leverage its deep-rooted culture of ‘jugaad’ (frugal innovation) and build a robust, sustainable technological future, coordinated institutional action is essential:

• Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY): There is a need to embed repairability criteria into all new policies, including those related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and procurement.
• Department of Consumer Affairs: Expansion of the Right to Repair framework to mandate proper product classification and ensure community involvement in repair initiatives.
• Ministry of Labour and Employment: The e-Shram portal must formally recognise informal repairers, connecting them to crucial social protection and skill-building schemes.
• Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship: There is a need to design training programmes that account for the tacit and diagnostic nature of repair work, moving beyond standardised industrial templates.
• Leveraging AI for Knowledge Preservation: AI can play a transformative role by:
  • Utilising Large Language Models (LLMs) to document the experiential, tacit knowledge of repairers, capturing their narratives and insights.
  • Developing decision trees that provide step-by-step guidance for repairs, drawing on this documented expertise. 
• Shifting Design and Procurement Norms: Policy must encourage “designing for unmaking,” where product disassembly and repair are anticipated from the outset, influencing both hardware standards and AI-integrated systems.
• Recognising Repairers: Policymakers must view informal repairers not as marginal figures but as stewards of sustainability, whose labour is central to the circular economy.

Conclusion

The ‘right to repair’ is incomplete without the ‘right to remember’. 

• By consciously choosing to preserve and value the tacit, embodied wisdom of India’s repair community, the nation can build a technological future that is not only innovative and efficient but also deeply sustainable, equitable, and resilient.