Repair Economy in India: Importance, Issues and Impact

Context: In May 2025, India introduced a Repairability Index for electronics and improved e-waste rules to encourage formal recycling. Yet, the systems that quietly sustain everyday life — especially the informal repair and maintenance economy — remain largely invisible in digital and policy frameworks.

Importance of the Repair Economy in India

• Supports Circular Economy: Repairers play a crucial role in extending product life cycles, reducing e-waste, and promoting reuse over disposal.
• Environmental Sustainability: Aligns with SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) and Mission LiFE by reducing material extraction, pollution, and carbon footprint.
• Employment and Livelihoods: Provides informal employment to thousands, especially in urban centres like Karol Bagh (Delhi) and Ritchie Street (Chennai).
• Preservation of Tacit Knowledge: Repair work embodies intuitive, hands-on knowledge passed through generations via observation, not formal training.
• Affordable Access to Technology: Repairers make expensive electronics usable for longer periods, ensuring digital access for lower-income populations.
• Contribution to Material Resilience: Enables resilience against planned obsolescence and supply-chain constraints by promoting local reuse and improvisation.

Also Read: Repairability Index

Issues Associated with the Repair Economy

• Durability & Disposability: Product designs are becoming less repairable (e.g., only 23% of smartphones in Asia are rated repairable).
  • Consumer habits shift toward disposability.
• Policy and Regulatory Neglect: E-Waste Rules 2022 and skilling schemes under PMKVY mention recycling but not repair as a core strategy.
  • Lack of legal recognition or inclusion in formal sector schemes like e-Shram.
• Erosion of Skills and Ecosystem: Youth are less inclined to learn due to the absence of structured apprenticeships or incentives.
• Lack of Documentation and Certification: Tacit skills are not codified or formally certified, limiting recognition and scalability.
• Market Exclusion: Informal repairers have little access to spare parts, manuals, or diagnostic tools due to restrictive company policies.
• Digital Divide in Skill Development: National Education Policy (NEP) promotes experiential learning but lacks clear frameworks for supporting traditional skill domains like repair.

Impact of AI and Digital Technologies on the Repair Economy

Negative Impacts

• Design Centralization: AI-driven designs optimise for performance and compactness, not repair.
  • Proprietary software locks reduce local diagnosis or repair interventions.
• Displacement Risk: AI may automate troubleshooting, but without integrating informal repairers, the benefits remain inaccessible to them.
• Knowledge Extraction without Recognition: AI systems can learn from repair patterns or user data, but the human contributors behind such tacit insights remain unacknowledged.

Positive Potentials (if inclusively implemented)

• Documentation of Tacit Knowledge: Large Language Models (LLMs) can codify oral repair stories into structured guides.
• Decision Trees and Repair Pathways: AI can map and disseminate common repair workflows, enhancing community learning and interoperability.
• Digitally-Enabled Recognition: Integration with platforms like e-Shram can formalise identity, access to benefits, and connect repairers to digital skilling platforms.

Conclusion

• India’s traditions of frugality and improvisation long predate its AI ambitions.
• Recognising repairers as knowledge workers — not marginalised figures — is key to inclusive sustainability.
• With coordinated action, India can lead globally in aligning circular economy goals with AI, climate, and digital policy, rooted in ground-up innovation.

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