The Right to Repair: The Fight to Actually Own the Things You Buy

I once paid nearly half the price of a new washing machine to replace a single control board — a part the size of a playing card — because the brand’s service engineer told me it could not be repaired, only swapped, and only by him. That is the small, ordinary moment where the idea of right to repair comes alive. When the thing you paid for breaks, and the only person allowed to fix it is the company that made it, at a price carefully set just below the cost of buying new, you begin to notice something uncomfortable: you don’t fully own the object sitting in your home. You own a kind of long-term lease that the manufacturer can quietly repossess through a broken hinge, a dead battery, or a software lock.

The right to repair is the simple proposition that if you bought it, you should be able to fix it — or take it to whoever you trust to fix it. Not just the maker’s authorised centre. In practice that means access to four things: spare parts at fair prices, the tools a repair actually requires, the manuals and schematics that explain how the thing is put together, and the diagnostic software that modern devices need before a repair will even register as complete. Take away any one of those and “repairable” becomes a technicality. The part exists, but only the mothership can install it.

How a fixable object became a disposable one

None of this is an accident of engineering. It is a business decision, and it has a name: planned obsolescence. The clearest version is the phone whose battery is glued rather than clipped, so that the single component guaranteed to wear out is the one you cannot replace without heat, suction, and a real risk of cracking the screen. But obsolescence hides in subtler places too — a software update that makes an older model crawl, a proprietary screw that no ordinary screwdriver fits, a “paired” part that refuses to work unless the manufacturer’s server blesses it first.

The economic logic is brutally clean. A company that sells you a durable good makes money once. A company that sells you a good you must replace every three years makes money forever. Repair is the enemy of that model, because a repaired product is a sale that didn’t happen. So the incentive runs exactly backwards from what a buyer wants: the maker profits when the thing fails, and profits again when failure is engineered to be unfixable.

A company that sells you a durable good makes money once. A company that sells you a good you must replace every three years makes money forever.

This is the same pattern I keep returning to when I write about how technology gets captured — a tool that was meant to serve the person using it gets quietly reorganised to serve the person selling it. A screwdriver doesn’t care who turns it. But a locked ecosystem does, and the lock is where the value shifts. Every repair you’re not allowed to do is a decision transferred from you to the manufacturer, and decisions are where power lives.

India’s specific push

India has taken this on more directly than most people realise. The Department of Consumer Affairs has been building out what is generally described as a Right to Repair framework, anchored by a government Right to Repair Portal (reachable at righttorepairindia.gov.in). As I understand its current shape, the portal is meant to bring manufacturers together across four sectors: mobiles and electronics, consumer durables, automobiles, and farming equipment. In principle it gives consumers a single place to find product manuals, repair videos, spare-part prices and warranty terms, service-centre locations, and — crucially — information about third-party repairers, not only the brand’s own network.

I want to be careful here, because the temptation is to describe this as a finished law with teeth, and it isn’t quite that. It is better read as an evolving framework: a portal onto which brands are being onboarded, sector by sector, alongside related work like a proposed “repairability index” intended to score how fixable a product is at the point of sale. Dozens of well-known brands are reported to have registered. But how much of the coverage is genuinely binding versus voluntary, and how vigorously any of it is enforced, is still developing. What matters is the direction of travel. A government treating repairability as a consumer right — rather than a favour the manufacturer may or may not grant — is a real shift, even while the details are still being written.

The stakes for India are not only about fairness. They are about mountains of discarded electronics. When repair is impossible or artificially expensive, the broken device doesn’t rest — it becomes waste, often handled in exactly the informal, hazardous conditions I’ve written about in the piece on e-waste in India. A right to repair and a serious e-waste problem are two ends of the same rope. Every extra year a phone or a fridge stays in service is a year it isn’t leaching heavy metals into someone’s neighbourhood.

The global backdrop: farmers, phones, and software locks

India is not moving in isolation. The European Union has pushed some of the most far-reaching rules, nudging manufacturers toward making spare parts and repair information available and, in some categories, designing for repairability outright. In the United States, the fight has mostly played out state by state, with places like New York, Minnesota, and California passing their own repair laws — a patchwork, but a growing one.

The story that crystallised the whole movement, though, came from farm country. American farmers discovered that their expensive modern tractors — machines they had bought outright — could refuse to run after a repair until dealer-only diagnostic software authorised the fix. A farmer with the mechanical skill to rebuild an engine in a field could be stopped cold by a line of code. Some resorted to jailbreaking their own tractors’ firmware just to bring in a harvest on time. It was a near-perfect illustration of the principle: the metal was theirs, but the software that controlled the metal was not, and whoever controls the software controls the machine.

The metal was theirs, but the software that controlled the metal was not — and whoever controls the software controls the machine.

That software layer is what makes the modern version of this fight different from anything our grandparents faced. A 1970s tractor or radio could be understood by anyone patient enough to open it. Today the lock is often invisible and digital — a paired part, a server handshake, a diagnostic gate. This is the same quiet toll-taking I described in the real cost of free apps: the product looks like it’s yours, works like it’s yours, right up until the moment you try to do something the maker would rather you pay them for.

Who captures the value

Strip away the policy language and this is, at bottom, a question about where value flows. When a repair is open — parts available, manuals published, independent shops free to compete — the value of fixing your device stays close to you. It’s split between you and the local technician who does honest work at a fair rate. Money circulates in your own economy. A repair culture supports a whole layer of skilled small businesses; the neighbourhood phone-repair stall is a genuine livelihood, and it exists only because repair is possible.

When repair is closed, that value is siphoned upward and outward — to the manufacturer, and usually out of the country entirely. The “repair” becomes a replacement, the replacement becomes a new sale, and the local technician who could have fixed it for a tenth of the price is locked out by a missing part or an unavailable manual. Multiply that across a billion people’s phones, appliances, two-wheelers, and tractors, and you’re talking about an enormous transfer of wealth, decided not by what’s technically necessary but by what’s commercially convenient.

This is why I find the right-to-repair movement genuinely hopeful rather than merely regulatory. It is one of the clearest cases where the direction of capture can be reversed — where a specific, winnable policy shifts power and value back from the maker to the owner. It doesn’t require anyone to give up modern technology. It just requires that the technology stay accountable to the person who paid for it.

What this means in practice

You don’t have to wait for the framework to be finished to act on its logic. A few things are already in your hands:

• Ask before you buy. Is the battery replaceable? Are spare parts sold to the public? Does an independent shop nearby service this brand? A product that fails these questions is quietly more expensive than its price tag suggests.
• Favour repair over replacement, even when the maker nudges the other way. A screen or a battery swap that keeps a working device alive is almost always the cheaper and cleaner choice.
• Use the tools that exist. Where a government portal or an independent repair community publishes manuals, spare-part prices, or the names of trustworthy third-party repairers, that information is leverage — it tells you what a fair repair should cost and who can do it.
• Support the independent shops. Every repair you route to a local technician instead of an authorised replacement keeps a skill alive and a livelihood intact.

These are small acts, but the whole point of the capture story is that it’s built out of small defaults — the glued battery, the unavailable part, the software gate — and it can be un-built the same way. If you want a fuller sense of the moves available to an ordinary person, I’ve gathered them in what you can actually do.

The phone in your pocket, the two-wheeler in your compound, the tractor in the field, the washing machine that ate half its own value in a single control board — you paid for all of them. The right to repair is really just the right to have that ownership mean what it says. It is a quiet, unglamorous fight, waged over screws and schematics and lines of firmware. But it is one of the few fights where the value being contested can actually come home.