India has officially started banning laptop imports beginning January 2025. This could spell disaster for tech giants, but this could mean stronger domestic production for the local stores.
With India's digital access, technicians in the country are ramping repairs to salvage a dead laptop. Repairing the so-called "Frankenstein" laptops could mean saving e-waste. This is also a friendly way to fix the budget-friendly machines to put them into good use once again.
The refurbished laptops offer a new lease of life not only to electronics but also to students, freelancers, and small business owners across the country.
Why Frankenstein Laptops Are So Popular
In an exclusive report by The Verge with Sushil Prasad, a 35-year-old technician, Indian consumers often go with more affordable laptops. They usually ditch high-end brands since they are expensive.
In a country where a new laptop can cost over ₹70,000 ($800), refurbished ones that cost between ₹10,000 ($110) are a revolution.
For Prasad, that boils down to practicality. As long as the device is working and the technicians recycle a machine using once-broken screens, batteries, and motherboards, there's a way to use the laptops for many purposes.
The appeal is straightforward: hybrid laptops provide performance at a fraction of the price, allowing for online education and remote employment, particularly for poor families. They tend to be produced with components obtained from imported e-waste materials, such as used electronics from Dubai and China.
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The Hidden Repair Heroes of India's E-Waste Markets
Technicians like Prasad rely heavily on informal e-waste hubs such as Delhi's Seelampur, Asia's largest electronics scrapyard. Here, nearly 50,000 workers sort through 30,000 tonnes of waste daily, salvaging reusable components.
Farooq Ahmed, an 18-year-old scrap dealer, has made it his job to supply functional RAM, batteries, and motherboards. If the e-waste scraps won't undergo repair, they will just "rot in landfills."
Yet, this underground economy is not risk-free. Without safety equipment, workers are vulnerable to poisonous substances such as lead and mercury, posing severe health risks. Nevertheless, the ecosystem sustains thousands of livelihoods and prevents tons of e-waste from entering the environment.
The War Between Repair Culture and Tech Giants
Though India has a long tradition of repair and reuse, technology companies are fighting hard against it. Products are increasingly being made impossible to fix by manufacturers, using proprietary screws, locked-up spare parts, and software locks to implement planned obsolescence. This compels customers to take the new one instead of mending the old one.
Satish Sinha of Toxics Link, a Delhi-based environmental NGO, terms this development perilous.
"India has always had a repair culture, from fixing old radios to hand-me-down phones. But companies are pushing planned obsolescence, making repairs harder and forcing people to buy new devices instead," Sinha said.
The Right to Repair
Even though the Indian government has started discussions around right-to-repair laws, substantial reforms are still to come. If official acceptance is provided for independent repair shops, with access to certified components and safety protocols, it may transform the technology recycling sector.
Until then, anonymous heroes in dark workshops keep piecing together the digital aspirations of a billion individuals—one refurbished laptop at a time.
