In 2021, we understood the importance of Right to Repair.
Succinctly (briefly), this means that a buyer should have the right to open and repair their product instead of being forced by the manufacturer to either buy an altogether new piece as replacement, or depend only on the manufacturer’s own service and repair centers.
A manufacturer is duty bound to:
A. Design the product such that it is possible and easy to repair. (For example, in some laptops, the battery is hard soldered. This means that if the battery goes bad, the entire laptop needs to be thrown away).
B. Make repair manuals freely available so that consumers and trained repair personnel can repair devices on their own.
C. Make spare parts available to the open market. Usually, original spare parts are only available at company owned or authorised service centers, which can charge the consumer heavily for “labour charges”. If the spare part is freely available, a person can see the repair manual and try to repair their product on their own.
D. Make service information easy to get and use.
India story so far
On 13th July 2022, the Department of Consumer Affairs started developing a framework to introduce Right to Repair as a legal consumer right in India.
India’s Right to Repair portal, which can be accessed here, has four major categories –
A. Agriculture and Farm Equipment
B. Automobile equipment
C. Mobile, Display, and Data Storage equipment
D. Household appliances
47 brands have enrolled with the portal so far.
How to use the portal
In the top menu, choose customer care, and then choose the sector.
This leads to a listing of the companies. Choose the company you would like. For our example, we will choose Sony India.
Not all the available products of a company may be listed. For Sony, we find that only two products have been listed on the portal.
Clicking on any product takes us to the service and repair information. The most important element of Right to Repair is access to repair manuals, videos, and compatible and original spare parts.
When we click on headphones, we find the following links.
But the section on Repair video does not take us to repair videos. It takes us to the Youtube channel of Sony India. There are some support videos there, but they are all from the manual. There are no repair videos.
We also observed the same thing for Kent RO.
In both cases, a list of compatible spares was not available. This means that the consumer would have to buy company spares only.
Other countries
Many states in the US were the first to pass the Right to Repair laws. The movement started in 2012 when a law in Massachusetts required carmakers to provide repair manuals and spare parts to consumers, and not force them to depend on company service centers.
The European Union, Great Britain, and Ireland passed the Right to Repair Act in March 2021.
In June 2022, the US state of New York passed the first Right to Repair Act for digital electronics manufacturers.
In April 2023, the US state of Colorado became the first one to pass a law that gives Right to Repair to owners of agricultural equipment.
The House of Commons of Canada unanimously passed a Right to Repair Act in October 2023. (Bill C-244).
While China did ask automakers to make repair manuals available to consumers as far back as 2015, no legislation or policy action has been taken in the direction of making Right to Repair a legal right.
So far, India has not proposed a Bill to make Right to Repair a legal right.
Why do manufacturers oppose right to repair?
The first reason, clearly, is that profit margins will become much lower.
Manufacturers also feel that the control over quality of repairs will be low.
The third point of opposition relates to IP – Intellectual Property. Manufacturers believe that they have intellectual rights over the products they research and create. This means that no one else should legally be able to take the product apart and reverse engineer it. (Reverse engineering is a process by which we take a machine apart to understand how it works, then we try to create a similar product).
Question for you
What do you think of the Right to Repair? Should India pass a law to guarantee Right to Repair? Or, should we keep it voluntary, as it is as the moment?
All images from the government portal.