Kiruba's Amazing Information

The screen cracks in the second month after the warranty ends. You call the service centre, they quote a number that sends you looking up what the same phone costs refurbished, and for a few minutes the sensible move looks like throwing the whole device away. That decision, taken a few million times a year, is what the right to repair India framework is built to change. It has travelled further than most buyers realise. It has also stopped short in one place that matters.

Why the right to repair India push matters more than it looks

It matters because repairability is about to become a number printed next to the price, and a number changes buying behaviour in a way that a policy document never does, even a self-declared one.

The index grades six things: how deep you have to go to take the device apart, whether repair information exists at all, how quickly spare parts can be had, how long software updates keep arriving, what tools the job needs, and what kind of fasteners hold it together. Those grades get weighted across the parts that actually fail, the battery, the display, the camera and the charging port, then rolled into one headline number. Anyone who has priced a MacBook battery replacement understands why that weighting is the right call. The component most likely to die is rarely the one the design makes easy to reach.

Here is the part that deserves scepticism. The rating is self-declared. A manufacturer runs the criteria over its own product and publishes the result. Business Today, reporting the committee's May 2025 submission, quoted Consumer Affairs Secretary Nidhi Khare saying plainly that companies are not manufacturing devices for life. She is right about the disease. I am less certain about the dose, because a rating in which the graded party writes the grade tends to drift upward, and nobody has yet said who checks a score that looks too kind. That is the real unresolved bit, and it is an opinion rather than a finding.

The numbers sitting underneath all this explain the hurry. They also explain why readers who long ago worked out that building a DIY external SSD beat buying a sealed one were making a repairability judgement without calling it one.

The complaint trend, counted by the national consumer helpline, is the one to watch. Every one of those calls is somebody who already tried the ordinary route, the service centre, the brand's app, the retailer, and got nowhere, which means the national helpline is measuring failure after the fact instead of friction as it happens. A disclosure rule cannot fix that. It can only make the next purchase better informed than the last one.

What is the repairability index for smartphones?

It is a five-point score rating how easily a phone or tablet can be opened, diagnosed and fixed, shown at the point of sale, on e-commerce listings and as a QR code on the box.

The score answers one question well, or rather it will answer it, once somebody actually prints it. How fixable is this thing. What it dodges is everything that follows: who has to stock the part, and for how long, and how fast it has to reach a workshop. The European Union answered those in a regulation that has been in force since June 2025, which makes the two approaches worth holding side by side.

Line them up and the gap states itself. Of the six things India's index will grade, the European rules have already fixed a hard number to four: how long parts stay available, how fast they arrive, how many years of updates a device gets, and how much battery life counts as enough. That comparison is our own reading of the two documents against each other, not a figure either government publishes. India is building a label. Europe built a contract.

How do I use the Right to Repair Portal India?

Search it by brand or by product name and it returns that company's published repair position: authorised service options, warranty conditions, spare part details and contact routes, across farming equipment, mobiles and electronics, consumer durables and automobiles. It costs nothing and takes about a minute per model, which is a better return than almost anything else you can do before a purchase.

Does a third-party repair void my warranty in India?

Not automatically, but the honest answer is that it depends on the brand's own terms. India has no statutory rule saying a warranty survives an outside repair, which is exactly the sort of gap the new index leaves untouched.

The portal helps here, up to a point. It shows you what a brand says about warranty and authorised service, which at least gives you a published position to argue against instead of whatever the person behind the counter remembers. Anyone who has been stuck inside a telecom operator's automated support loop already knows what a written policy you can quote back is worth.

The deeper problem is where the information comes from. The portal describes its own content as aggregated from the manufacturers, which puts it in the same family as a disclosure written by the seller. Not worthless. Just not independent, and anyone who followed how the RBI's mis-selling rules shifted the burden onto the bank will recognise, by contrast, what a rule with teeth actually looks like.

• A high rating published by the maker is a marketing claim until somebody independent audits it.
• A generous sounding clause on the portal is still only the brand's clause, written by the brand.
• Parts pricing is where most repairs die, so ask for the part cost, not the total quote.
• Nothing in the framework obliges a company to keep making a part for your particular model.

Do one thing this week. Before the next phone purchase in your house, open the government portal, look up both models you are choosing between, and read what each company actually commits to on parts and service. The score is not printed on the box yet. The policies behind it already are, and the buyer who reads them is the only person in this arrangement not waiting for a rule to arrive.

Zero rupees. That is the charge on your UPI payment today, and it has not moved since Parliament amended the law in August 2026. Which makes a UPI surcharge on a printed bill a commercial decision by the shop rather than a rule anybody is following. Knowing that is the easy part. Saying it at a counter, to a shopkeeper who read the same headline you did and reached the opposite conclusion, is the part this piece is about.

What Is A UPI Surcharge, And Is It Legal?

A UPI surcharge is an extra line a merchant adds to your bill for paying by UPI, and no notified rule permits or requires one, so a shop charging it is making its own pricing decision and should be asked to say so in writing.

The rule that kept UPI free was Section 10A of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007, which worked by pointing at the Income-tax Act. Break that chain and the protection goes. The amendment, cleared by the Rajya Sabha on 11 August 2026, rewrote the section so that it now protects whichever payment modes the Central Government specifies by notification.

Read that carefully, because both the panic and the reassurance are wrong in different directions. No charge exists, since a bill that enables is not a bill that levies. And the reassurance is only good for as long as it lasts, because the whole point of the amendment is to make the next change an executive decision rather than a parliamentary one. The gap between the government may and the government has is where all the real detail sits, exactly as it did with the RBI's mis-selling rules on their way from draft to enforceable.

The Three Questions To Ask At The Counter

Keep it short and keep it polite, because the person in front of you is usually not trying to cheat anybody and has simply read a forwarded message, which means the argument you want is with the message rather than with him.

Ask which rule the charge follows. Ask for the charge to be shown as a separate line on the bill. Ask whether the same total applies if you pay cash. Those three cover almost every version of this. A shop that has decided to price card and UPI differently can say so, and you can then decide whether to buy. A shop that cannot name a rule and will not itemise the line has answered the question without meaning to.

• Which rule is this: a real charge has a source, and no gazette notification naming payment modes has been issued.
• Itemise it on the bill: a surcharge folded silently into the total is the version you cannot dispute later.
• Does cash cost the same: if it does not, you are being charged for the payment method, so price it before you agree.
• Screenshot both: photograph the bill line and the payment confirmation before you leave the shop.

Where Does A Complaint Actually Go?

To the acquiring bank behind the merchant's QR code first, then to your payment app, and to the National Consumer Helpline if the amount and the principle are worth the time. I would be honest with you, though, about what that time is likely to buy.

Here is the honest part. Raising a formal complaint over a twelve rupee line costs more energy than the money involved, and anyone who has fought an automated support queue already knows how that ends. Most people pay and move on, which is quietly how a rule that applies to nobody becomes a cost that lands on everybody. So the realistic push back is the one at the counter, made in the moment, in front of the next customer in the queue.

What This Will Not Fix

Asking the right questions at a counter does not stop a shop from pricing UPI differently if it decides to. It also will not help with the likelier outcome, a merchant fee that never appears as a line and simply sits inside the price.

I will take a position that is not popular in the commentary. The merchant against consumer distinction is weaker in practice than the official framing suggests, not because anybody is being dishonest, but because a real merchant fee gets priced into what the shop sells in the same way rent and electricity do. At the scale being discussed it may never show on a price tag. That is a reasonable expectation and still only an expectation, since no such fee has ever run on UPI at national scale. We also do not cover business acquiring contracts here, which is where a merchant's actual cost is set, and if a repair or a refund is what went wrong rather than a payment, what you are owed when a repair goes badly is the more useful page.

So do one thing this week. The next time somebody tells you UPI now carries charges, ask for the notification number, and watch what happens to the conversation. The same habit that catches a quietly changed tax filing form works here: go to the document, not the headline. Then set yourself a reminder to ask the same question again in six months, when the answer might have changed.

The loan officer slides three forms across the desk. One is the home loan you actually came for. The other two are a life cover and a monthly investment plan, already filled in, already ticked, and he mentions that the file tends to move faster this way. You sign all three, because the sanction is two days out and arguing feels expensive. That exact scene, repeated a few million times a year across Indian branches, is what the Reserve Bank spent this February trying to make indefensible.

Why Your Signature Stopped Being the Bank's Defence

The interesting move here is not the list of bans. It is the definition. RBI's draft Amendment Directions, issued on 11 February 2026 after the policy statement of 6 February, define mis-selling to cover the "sale of a product / service, which is neither suitable nor appropriate in view of the customer's profile even if with his / her explicit consent." Read that last clause again. For years the branch's answer to any complaint was a signed form with your name on it. Under this draft, that form settles nothing.

Suitability is not left as a mood, either. A bank has to map what it sells against your age, income, employment profile, financial literacy, risk tolerance and investment horizon, classify its own products by complexity and risk, and write down the logic connecting the two. Most coverage treated this as compliance paperwork. That reading undersells it badly. Suitability is the load-bearing wall of the whole framework: bans on specific tricks age badly, because sales teams invent new ones, but a written suitability test follows the product wherever it goes. The forced-package problem is not unique to banking, and readers who followed our breakdown of the scam behind DTH combo channel packages will recognise the shape of it instantly.

Consent gets rebuilt from the ground up too. It has to be specific, informed, unambiguous and captured by a clear affirmative action, and it is required before the bank even approaches you, not merely before you sign. Having a loan with a bank no longer entitles that bank to pitch you insurance. Pre-ticked boxes and catch-all lines about receiving offers from partners are out. Anyone who has tried to trace who exactly sold their number to a call centre will find this familiar territory, much like the gaps we covered in TRAI's proposal for universal caller ID. There is a sharper provision buried in the staff rules: employees who market third-party products cannot accept any direct or indirect incentive from the company whose product they are pushing. That single line does more damage to aggressive branch selling than the entire consent chapter.

None of this arrives in a vacuum. Complaint volumes are what forced the regulator's hand, and they explain why the draft reaches for compensation rather than a warning letter. The figures below set the scale of the problem and the size of the remedy now attached to it.

The complaint window is the number to write on your fridge. It does not start when you notice the problem. It starts when the signed copy of your terms lands with you, which for most people is an email attachment they never open. Miss it and the refund route defined in the draft closes, leaving you back at the ordinary grievance queue, where the clock is longer and the outcome is thinner. Read the attachment the day it arrives.

Branch Practice Before, and What the Draft Demands

Most of these obligations only make sense when you set them beside what a branch actually does today. The left column is not a caricature. It is standard practice at a large number of Indian bank counters, and every line of it is now addressed by a specific clause.

Look down the right column and a pattern shows up. Almost every clause creates a record: a timestamped consent, a separate form, a confirmation message, an audit of the app screen. That is deliberate. A rule you cannot prove was broken is a rule nobody enforces, and this draft is mostly an exercise in making the bank generate the evidence against itself. The dates below show how fast the regulator moved once it decided to act.

Five days from announcement to published draft, and roughly five months from there to the expected commencement date.

Where This Gets Messy

The agent rules are the most concrete thing in the package and the easiest to check. Direct selling agents may contact you only between 09:00 and 18:00 hours unless you have expressly authorised otherwise, they cannot turn up at your home or workplace without your explicit consent, and they must hand over their supervisor's details if you ask. That is a real, enforceable boundary. Whether anyone answers the phone when you report a breach is a separate question, and the honest answer is that we do not know yet. Our account of Airtel's automated support response is a fair map of how long that road can run once a large company decides your complaint is a ticket rather than a problem.

Then there is the grey area nobody has resolved. Compulsory bundling is defined as making one product conditional on another, but it carves out packages offered free of extra cost. So what about the savings account you are told to open before the personal loan can be processed? It costs you nothing directly. It also is not optional. The draft can be read both ways, and until the final text or a clarification lands, that ambiguity is worth exactly as much as the branch manager wants it to be worth. Paperwork ambiguity has a long history of landing on the customer's side of the counter in this country, as anyone who has fought through India's tax filing forms and process will tell you.

A few things to keep in view before you assume the problem is solved.

• This is still a draft. It went out for stakeholder comment, and the text that commences may differ from the version being analysed today.
• The refund route runs through the bank's own approved policy first, so the compensation you get for a proven bank mis-selling case depends on a document the bank wrote.
• Consent given in the past does not disappear. If you ticked a blanket box three years ago, expect to have to withdraw it actively rather than watch it lapse.
• Enforcement lives with branch-level supervision, which is precisely where every previous fair-practice code went to die.

Do one thing this week. Log into your bank's app, open the consents or communication preferences page, and look at what you have apparently agreed to. Most people find at least one blanket permission they do not remember granting, and the draft rules give you a reason to strip it out now rather than after the next call from a number you do not recognise. Then find the signed terms of anything a branch sold you in the last month and read them properly. The clock on bank mis-selling redress is short, and it is already running.