In July 2022 Business Standard visited Gaffar Market in Karol Bagh, New Delhi. “Rumour has it that there is no device that cannot be repaired here,” the paper wrote.
A trader told the paper: “Almost 90 per cent of the parts we use while repairing phones come from China.” The paper added that “what traders call original here are essentially working parts.”
On December 24, 2022, National Consumer Day, Consumer Affairs Minister Piyush Goyal launched the Right to Repair portal. It began with mobile phones and electronics, consumer durables, automobiles and farming equipment.
The portal is meant to “allow customers to seek repairs of their devices elsewhere.” It hosts product manuals, schematics and software updates, so that people can “repair their devices on their own or through third parties.”
Raddi means waste paper. The Rekhta dictionary defines the raddiwala as a buyer of old and useless newspapers and magazines. The kabadiwala buys scrap of other kinds from homes.
The People’s Archive of Rural India followed one such buyer. “From the houses he visits, Das buys paper, including newspapers, at Rs. 8 per kilo,” it reported, “and sells it for Rs. 9-9.50 per kilo at the scrap shops.”
Mayapuri in Delhi “is, arguably, the biggest market for used automotive and industrial spare parts in India,” Wikipedia notes. Business Standard reported in 2022 that traders there buy old cars from scrap yards and take them apart for parts that can still be used.
In 2010 a cobalt-60 irradiator sold by Delhi University reached a scrap dealer in Mayapuri. “The cobalt-60 source was cut into eleven pieces.” One person died.
“Delhi’s Seelampur is India’s largest e-waste market,” the civic news site Citizen Matters reports. “The market employs close to 50,000 informal workers making a living out of extracting valuable metals.”
A rafoogar has “the skill to repair the damaged or torn clothes,” Wikipedia notes, especially Kashmiri shawls. Bijnor district in Uttar Pradesh is a center of the craft.
Rafoogari is described as a traditional art that “consists of sewing, making the joints, looping, and repairing holes or worn areas in fabric.”
Lamington Road near Grant Road station in Mumbai is called the “IT shop of Mumbai.” Its shops sell new computer goods and “even outdated electronic parts for radios like transistors, capacitors, cables, sound cards, TV tuners and adaptors,” Wikipedia notes.
It is described as the third largest market of its kind in India, after Nehru Place in Delhi and Ritchie Street in Chennai.
In April 2026 Maruti Suzuki reported that it had added 502 service touchpoints in the financial year 2025-26. Its after-sales network reached 5,926 touchpoints, “covering 3,000 cities and towns in India.”
Dharavi in Mumbai has “an increasingly large recycling industry, processing waste from other parts of Mumbai,” Wikipedia notes.
“An estimated 20% of its inhabitants work on different aspects of waste processing,” Dialogue Earth reported.