Your screen cracks on a Tuesday. The service centre quotes a number that makes you check whether a new handset would cost less, and the honest answer is often yes. That maths is not an accident. It is the product of decisions about glue, screws and who is allowed to hold the repair manual, and right to repair India is the policy trying to change it. A framework is drafted. A portal is live. What is still missing is the part that decides your bill.
India is building a repairability score for phones, but nothing in it forces a brand to make repair cheap.
- Six parameters get scored, and fasteners and spare-part supply matter more to your bill than the headline number.
- The portal is live, but onboarding is voluntary, so your brand may simply not be on it.
- Europe shipped this idea in June 2025, and most registered phone models still list no repair information.
- Check the battery fastener and the spare-part price before you buy.
Does India have the right to repair?
Partly. India has no standalone right to repair statute. What exists is a government portal where brands publish repair terms, plus a submitted framework for a repairability score on smartphones and tablets, both voluntary until notified.
The framework is not a rumour. A committee headed by Bharat Khera submitted the Framework on Repairability Index in the Mobile and Electronic Sector to the Department of Consumer Affairs in May 2025, with smartphones and tablets named as the first category. That is a real document with a real scope, sitting one notification away from mattering. Whether that notification lands this year is the part nobody will put in writing.
Anyone who has watched a device get quietly retired already knows why this matters. A phone rarely dies outright. It gets expensive to keep, in small increments, the same way extended support on Windows 10 turned into a paid tier, or the way smart home gear stopped working when its cloud service shut down. Repairability is that story told through hardware instead of software. Either the parts exist at a sane price, or the device is finished and you never got a vote.
Europe is two years ahead of us here, which makes it the only place with evidence instead of intentions. Four numbers from that experiment are worth carrying into any argument about India's version.
Parts deadline
5 to 10 days
EU spare-part delivery window
Repair info published
18%
of EU-registered phone models
Models audited
2,334
smartphone records in EPREL
Battery endurance
800 cycles
before capacity may drop under 80%
The delivery window is the quiet one. A repair shop that cannot get a display inside a fortnight does not schedule the job, it recommends a new handset, and the customer usually takes the advice because waiting feels worse than paying. Deadlines on parts supply are not paperwork. They decide whether a repair gets offered or merely mentioned.
Eighteen percent of registered phone models actually say where to buy a spare part. A score on a box is a label, not a repair.
What right to repair India scores on a phone
The index scores six parameters: disassembly depth, repair information, spare parts availability, software updates, tools, and fasteners. Each maps to a cost you meet later, which is why the parameter list matters more than any headline score.
Read those six against what Europe already requires and the gaps show up fast. India has named the categories. It has not yet named the thresholds, and a category without a threshold is a description, not a rule.
| Category | Detail | Insight |
|---|---|---|
| Disassembly | Repairability index covers 11 priority components, battery and display first | Battery access decides the repair bill |
| Repair info | Free public manuals and instructions, no login wall | Missing manuals lock out independent shops |
| Spare parts | EU floor is 7 years of supply after the model stops selling | India has named no equivalent deadline |
| Software | EU floor is 5 years of OS updates from the last unit sold | Update length caps a phone's useful life |
| Tools | Standard tools only, proprietary jigs cost points | Brand-only tools push you to brand service |
| Fasteners | Screws score above adhesive, type and supply both counted | Glue is why a battery swap costs more |
| Complaints | 22,864 filed in 2024-25, up from 19,057 in 2022-23 | Demand ran ahead of the rule |
| Portal reach | 65+ companies listed on the Right to Repair Portal across four sectors | Coverage is voluntary, not universal |
One line in that table deserves its own sentence, and it is my own arithmetic rather than anybody's published finding: Europe's parts clock outruns its update clock by two full years. A phone can sit in a window where the display is still orderable and the operating system no longer receives security patches. Repairable and unsafe at once. If India copies the structure without closing that gap, it imports the same window.
Europe also shows what happens when a score gets published and nobody checks it. An audit by iFixit and Right to Repair Europe, released in September 2026, went through the official product register and found the required repair links mostly absent. Here is what the missing four-fifths looked like.
Where the missing repair links went, by failure type, from the September 2026 audit of the EPREL product register by iFixit and Right to Repair Europe.
Where a repairability score stops helping you
A score only helps if somebody checks it. One year into Europe's version, an audit of the official product register found that most manufacturers had left the repair information field empty, and no regulator was systematically checking their entries.
The register is self-declared. A manufacturer types its own figures in, and the field for repair instructions went unfilled more often than it was filled. That is not an administrative gap around the mechanism. It is the mechanism.
So the useful reading of India's index is neither optimistic nor cynical. It is conditional. Notify it with an audit function and penalties behind it, and the score becomes worth reading. Notify it as a label with nothing enforcing it, and it becomes another sticker, and stickers have never lowered the price of a display assembly. My own view, offered as opinion rather than evidence: the parts-supply deadline is the single line in the framework that would move what you actually pay, and it is the one still left blank.
Does the United States have a right to repair law?
Not at the federal level. Coverage is state by state, and PIRG counted 25.75% of Americans living under an enforceable right to repair law as of January 2026, rising to at least 35.5% once Connecticut and Texas take effect later in the year. New York, Minnesota, California, Oregon, Colorado and Washington already have laws in force. The pattern is the opposite of a national framework, and it still moved manufacturers, which is the encouraging part of an otherwise messy picture.
- A high score with no parts in the country is a number, not a repair. Ask the service centre what it can actually order today.
- Voluntary onboarding means absence proves nothing. A brand missing from the portal has not failed a test, it simply never sat one.
- Adhesive is a price, not a design detail. A battery bonded to the chassis turns a routine swap into a screen-off job.
- Watch component prices alongside the score, because they move for reasons of their own, as the 2026 memory shortage made obvious.
Three checks that work before the rule does
- Before you buy. Ask how the battery is held in. Screws mean a swap, adhesive means the screen comes off first and the quote follows.
- Before you pay. Look the brand up on the government portal. If it is listed, its repair terms are public and the service centre can be held to them.
- Before you replace. A device still receiving security updates is worth repairing. One that has stopped is a different decision, whatever its score says.
Do one thing this week. Open the support page for the phone in your pocket and find two facts: how long it still gets security updates, and what a genuine display assembly costs. Those two numbers together tell you whether your next repair is a repair or a replacement, and no index will answer that faster than the manufacturer's own page does. The same instinct pays off further down the receipt, because the price you get shown is increasingly assembled from what a seller knows about you.