India goes shopping for a new assault rifle

Rahul Bedi 

Rahul Bedi reports on the defence ministry's decision to seek a long-pending replacement for the INSAS assault rifle for its troops

The Ministry of Defence has issued a tender for the import of 66,000 5.56 mm assault rifle for an estimated $250 million (Rs 13,000 crore) to replace the locally-designed Indian Small Arms System 5.56 mm AR, which the army has reluctantly employed since the mid-1990s.

The Request for Proposal dispatched to over 40 overseas vendors last month -- with bids to be submitted by mid-Feb 2012 -- requires the 3.66 kg AR's to convert to 7.62x39 mm and be fitted with Picatiny Rail-mounted reflex sights.

The ARs would also need to be equipped with under-barrel grenade launchers and be able to fire locally-produced ammunition.

The RfP also mandates a transfer of technology to the State-owned Ordnance Factory Board to locally make the ARs of which the eventual requirement is expected to be around 2 million for the army, the central paramilitary forces and state police in a massive programme estimated at $2-3 billion.Armament industry officials, however, said that the exclusion of the private sector from this potential contract was at variance with the MoD's much publicised aim of privatising the monopolistic State-run military-industrial sector.  

The imported ARs would supplant the INSAS 5.56 mm AR, which the army had inducted into service some 15 years and employed in counter-insurgency operations but consistently found it operationally inadequate.   

The army's association with the INSAS AR programme has been turbulent and problematic.

For long it had objected to the Defence Research and Development Organisation-designed and OFB-built INSAS 5.56 mm AR introduced into service in the mid-1990s to replace the heavier and outmoded range of 7.62mm FNFAL self-loading rifles.

But despite protestations centred round the INSAS ARs sights that malfunctioned in cold regions and its firing mechanism that jammed at critical times, the army was 'persuaded' by the MoD to induct the rifle that took the DRDO nearly a decade to design and the OFB another four to build.  

But frontline infantry and Rashtriya Rifles units deployed on counter-insurgency duties preferred the tested Kalishnikov-designed 7.62 mm AK 47 of which 100,000 were imported from Bulgaria in 1995 for $ 8.3 million as a 'stop gap' measure till the INSAS AR became operational. 

And more recently in 2002 the army imported 3,070 Israeli Weapon Industries' 5.56 mm Tavor 21 AR (TAR 21s) for its Special Forces for around $ 20 million that were inducted into service 2008 onwards.

A contract for an additional 10,000 TAR-21's with reflex sights for newly raised paramilitary SF units is nearing fruition.