India’s Repair Culture Gives New Life to Dead Laptops
Around the globe, governments are increasingly committed to making the right to repair the law of the land. India’s Ministry of Consumer Affairs is developing a set of rules requiring manufacturers of electronics, farm equipment, and automobiles to let people fix products themselves. France requires tech manufacturers to register their products with a national “repairability index.” And in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission has announced that it will crack down on repair restrictions.
Whatever the merits of these specific policy measures, they are responding to a growing sense that a consumer economy based on pushing people to discard the old and buy the new is no longer sustainable. Yet in an age in which smartphone models go out of date within months and many clothes are worn once or twice before being binned, the champions of repair face powerful obstacles. After all, obsolescence of consumer goods has been a cornerstone of the growth of developed economies for a century.
Hanan Zaffar and Danish Pandit (Hacker News):
Across India, in metro markets from Delhi’s Nehru Place to Mumbai’s Lamington Road, technicians like Prasad are repurposing broken and outdated laptops that many see as junk. These “Frankenstein” machines — hybrids of salvaged parts from multiple brands — are sold to students, gig workers, and small businesses, offering a lifeline to those priced out of India’s growing digital economy.
“We take usable components from different older or discarded systems to create a new functioning unit. For instance, we salvage parts from old laptop motherboards, such as capacitors, mouse pads, transistors, diodes, and certain ICs and use them in the newly refurbished ones,” says Prasad.
[…]
“A college student or a freelancer can get a good machine for INR 10,000 [about $110 USD] instead of spending INR 70,000 [about $800 USD] on a brand-new one. For many, that difference means being able to work or study at all.”
[…]
The Indian government has started discussions on right-to-repair laws, inspired by similar efforts in the European Union and the United States. However, progress remains slow, and repair shops continue to operate in legal limbo, often forced to source different parts from informal and e-waste markets.
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"and many clothes are worn once or twice before being binned"
What? People do that?
Glad to see this though and computers have had a usable base capability at a low price for a while now, as long as the software isn't purposely making the hardware obsolete.
Think about how many people are going to throw away perfectly good laptops with Windows 10 on them this year, because Microsoft needs to push people on to Windows 11 so they can push more services.
