Repair Over Rubbish

As we become more aware of our resources and we realise that we need not actually throw things away so easily, we come back to the tradition of repairing objects!

There are several groups of people that are crucial to this craft of repairing that are now struggling for an income because people don’t take the time to repair their belongings.

Similarly, objects that are designed cheap enough to be replaced or in a way that they CANNOT be repaired add to the pile of discarded items.

In India, we still have some repairing services available to us fairly cheaply, but if we don’t use these services and acknowledge these people soon we may not have them anymore

In India, there are still several artisans who can repair anything from a mobile phone to a cooker to a torn pant. These repair wallahs are slowly disappearing as we don’t use their services anymore and they cannot earn enough to survive.

The Beauty of Recycling festival brought together several such repairwallahs for you. We encourage you to participate.

We had the following repairwallahs with us:

  1. Tailor
  2. Mobile repair
  3. Watch repair
  4. Mochi – Shoes repair
  5. Rafu wala – darning of torn clothes
  6. Jewellery repair – Sunar
  7. Bag repair
  8. Knife sharping – Dharwallah

Ironically, the more expensive an object when you buy it, the more possible that you would take the time to get it repaired. While technology makes things more affordable it also makes things disposable!!

The people who help us repair our world … Cobblers, Mechanics etc.