AK-203: The Russian Assault Rifle India now Calls Its Own

Chandigarh: Over the weekend, India once again demonstrated its ability to turn an imported weapon into an “indigenous” one, with the Russian-designed Kalashnikov AK-203 assault rifle, progressively localised under the government's Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative, now being proclaimed as yet another triumph of self-reliance.

Christened ‘Sher’, or tiger, the rifle is the latest Russian iteration of the celebrated AK family of assault weapons, developed by Soviet soldier and weapons designer Mikhail Kalashnikov in the late 1940s.

This latest, supposedly Atmanirbhar version is now being presented as a significant milestone in Indian defence manufacturing, as the first AK-203 made entirely from local components and input materials has been manufactured and test-fired by Indo-Russian Rifles Private Limited (IRRPL) at Korwa in Amethi, Uttar Pradesh.

IRRPL is an India-Russia joint venture in which two Indian defence public sector units – Advanced Weapons & Equipment India Ltd and Munitions India Ltd – hold a combined 50.5% majority stake.

On Sunday, Major General S.K. Sharma, IRRPL's CEO and managing director, described Sher as having achieved “true, end-to-end, 100% genuine indigenisation”. “This is Atmanirbhar Bharat in action,” he declared, adding that the 7.62×39 mm-chambered AK-203 had successfully undergone a series of firing trials, with the initial results “extremely encouraging”. Multiple prototypes, he declared, would be handed over to the Indian Army for trials in September.

Indian Army infantry veterans, however, are less inclined to salute Sher’s atmanirbharta.

“Sher is yet another illustration of India's elastic definition of self-reliance,” said retired Brigadier Rahul Bhonsle of the Security Risks Consultancy Group in Delhi. A Russian-designed rifle, progressively localised over many years, is now being celebrated as an indigenous triumph, he observed. Sher, he drolly declared, is an Indian tiger but it has taken almost eight years to domesticate a Russian one whose ancestry stretches back nearly eight decades.

The timeline Brigadier Bhosle referred to renders the irony surrounding Sher difficult to overlook.

The India-Russia inter-governmental agreement to manufacture the AK-203 in India dates back to 2018, following which IRRPL was formally incorporated in February 2019 and the Korwa facility inaugurated soon afterwards. Yet it was only in August 2026 that the first AK-203 made entirely from Indian-sourced components and materials was announced – meaning that what is now being trumpeted as a fresh milestone in Atmanirbharta was, in effect, the destination promised when the project began, Bhonsle observed.

Furthermore, defence-industry sources said the intervening years had been swallowed up by the Ministry of Defence (MoD)'s well-known bureaucratic procedures, with protracted negotiations over contract price, royalties and technology transfer, compounded by shifting production arrangements and the painstaking localisation of the rifle's components and materials.

In other words, what should have been a relatively straightforward exercise in manufacturing a decades-old rifle became an eight-year bureaucratic odyssey through India's acquisition labyrinth – a remarkable amount of time to domesticate a design that had already been around for generations.

“Eight years to produce an entirely Indian version of a Russian-designed rifle is certainly an achievement, but hardly a sprint towards self-reliance,” said a three-star Army infantry veteran. If this is the pace at which Atmanirbharta is delivered, we may eventually become self-reliant, but only after the weapon systems we are trying to indigenise have themselves become museum pieces, he sarcastically added, requesting anonymity.

The veteran's quip acquires an even sharper edge when set against what the Army was forced to do while waiting for the AK-203 to materialise: it was left with little choice but to spend heavily on imported assault rifles to equip frontline troops while its own assault-rifle programme remained in prolonged flux.

Consequently, in February 2019, India contracted US manufacturer SIG Sauer for 72,400 SIG716 7.62×51 mm rifles for Rs 647 crore, with 66,400 going to the Army and the remainder to the Indian Air Force and Indian Navy. And, with the AK-203 programme still struggling to get off the ground, the MoD returned once again to the US supplier, signing a follow-on contract in 2024 for another 73,000 SIG716s worth Rs 837 crore.

In effect, the MoD and Army repeatedly had to turn to an American rifle to fill an urgent operational gap while waiting for the Russian-designed AK-203 to become Indian.

However, this seemingly endless cycle of imports, local manufacture and delayed indigenisation is hardly new to the Indian Army. Its rifle saga began in the late 1950s with another foreign design – the 7.62mm self-loading rifle (SLR), or Ishapore Rifle, an Indian adaptation of the British L1A1 version of Belgium's FN FAL, whose design dates to 1953.

Rather than designing an entirely new rifle from scratch, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO)'s Armament Research and Development Establishment (ARDE) essentially adapted and localised the foreign British/Belgian design for Indian manufacture and began producing it at the erstwhile Ordnance Factory Board (OFB)'s Rifle Factory Ishapore in West Bengal from 1960 onwards.

The SLR remained the Army’s standard infantry rifle for decades, but by the 1980s the operational need for a modern assault rifle emerged and the MoD once again turned to the ARDE to design one.

The ARDE spent nearly a decade designing the 5.45x45 mm rifle at great cost, as part of the Indian Small Arms System (INSAS), which also included a sniper rifle, carbine and machine gun. The latter three weapon systems, however, were abandoned early on in their development cycle, but around the mid-1990s the Army was ‘persuaded’ by the MoD to ‘approve’ and induct the INSAS assault rifle, which then went into series production at Ishapore.

Soon after its induction in the late 1990s, problems with the INSAS rifle’s reliability began to surface, particularly with its sights, which malfunctioned in extreme temperatures, and its firing mechanism, which was prone to jamming during firefights, sometimes with fatal consequences.

Yet successive Army chiefs persisted with the INSAS as the infantry’s principal weapon, and it went into the 1999 Kargil War as the standard rifle of India’s combat formations, much to the operational frustration of many troops.

Frontline infantry and Rashtriya Rifles units, deployed on counter-insurgency operations, however, preferred the tested Russian Ak-47s, many of which had been seized from militants in addition to around 100,000 that were imported from Bulgaria around 2000 for $8.3 million as a ‘stop-gap’ measure. At the time, the INSAS rifle cost Rs 16,000-18,000 each, compared to the imported Bulgarian licence-produced Ak-47s that were priced at around Rs 4,185 per unit, industry sources said.

The INSAS rifle's shortcomings also became a contentious issue between New Delhi and Kathmandu in August 2005, after the then Royal Nepal Army (RNA) complained that the weapons had repeatedly malfunctioned during firefights with Maoist guerrillas, allegedly contributing to fatalities and casualties. The RNA also reported that the rifles became dangerously hot and effectively unusable after sustained firing.

India reacted angrily, rejecting the complaints and blaming the problem instead on the RNA's inexperience in maintaining the weapons – a response that did little to improve relations with Nepal's military and further alienated the Himalayan kingdom’s Army.

But in 2010, the Army’s rocky relationship with the INSAS rifle finally ended when it formally declared the weapon “operationally inadequate” and overtaken by “technological development” – a polite bureaucratic euphemism for what was, in effect, an acknowledgement that the rifle had fallen badly short of the Army’s expectations.

Thus, after more than a decade in service, the INSAS rifle, developed as India’s indigenous answer to its infantry-rifle requirement, was effectively consigned to the scrapheap, leaving the Army once again searching for a replacement.

What the Army then sought was even more extraordinary.

It floated a requirement for a hybrid assault rifle capable of swiftly switching between 5.56×45 mm and 7.62×39 mm simply by replacing the barrel. Most remarkably, the Army’s carefully crafted qualitative requirements (QRs) called for a capability that was still only at the prototype stage, globally.

Even as successive Army chiefs persisted with the INSAS rifle as the infantry's principal weapon, the Army had to ultimately acknowledge that the weapon had fallen badly short of its expectations. Representative image courtesy Vikramaadityasumbria/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-3.0.

Undeterred by the obvious technological difficulties, the MoD, at the Army’s behest, issued global tenders in 2011 to more than 40 vendors for 66,000 such multi-calibre rifles, with the shortlisted model eventually to be licence-built by the OFB under a technology-transfer arrangement. The tender was intended as the first tranche of an Army requirement for 750,000 assault rifles, with additional quantities envisaged for India’s paramilitary and state police forces.

Trials, concluded in late 2014, featured four weapons – the Beretta ARX160 from Italy, the Czech BREN 805, Israel Weapon Industries' IWI ACE and the US Colt Combat Rifle. None could meet the Army’s exacting – and, critics argued, fantastical – QRs, leaving India’s largest and operationally most active service still clamouring for the most basic piece of infantry equipment: a reliable assault rifle.

For years, over-engineered and frequently over-ambitious QRs had become a recurring obstacle to military modernisation, particularly in the Army, and the multi-calibre rifle disaster was merely one of the more spectacular examples. The requirements could become so detached from what was technologically available that even the late defence minister Manohar Parrikar openly mocked them.

At the India Today Conclave in New Delhi in March 2015, Parrikar, with then Army Chief General Bikram Singh sitting beside him, described some of the technologies demanded in the armed forces’ general staff QRs as “absurd and unrealistic”, joking that they appeared to have been lifted from “Marvel comic books”.

It was a devastatingly apt description of a procurement system that could spend years demanding weapons that barely existed before eventually discovering that nobody could actually supply them.

Soon after the multi-calibre rifle fiasco was scrapped in 2015, the Army went back to square one, reopening the question of what calibre it actually wanted for the basic weapon of its infantry soldier. An attempt to develop another indigenous rifle with the OFB and DRDO also failed. By August 2016, the Army had settled on the heavier 7.62×51 mm calibre for a battle rifle, citing the need for greater lethality and range, and sought an immediate supply of such weapons for frontline troops.

That requirement led directly to the aforementioned SIG-716 imports, but alongside this immediate procurement, India was pursuing a separate Russian track for the Army's larger assault-rifle requirement. This was the AK-203, chambered for the distinctly different 7.62×39 mm cartridge used by the Kalashnikov family of assault rifles.

In 2018-19, India and Russia agreed to manufacture the rifle in India, established the IRRPL and its production facility at Korwa that was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in March 2019, weeks before the general election. Thus, the Army ended up pursuing two different solutions to its infantry-rifle problem simultaneously: an American 7.62×51 mm rifle for its immediate battle-rifle requirement, and a Russian-designed 7.62×39 mm rifle for large-scale manufacture in India.

The AK-203 eventually entered production at Korwa in 2023, but localisation remained incremental, with indigenous content initially reported at around 50%, later rising to approximately 85% with 47 of the rifle’s 50 components reportedly being manufactured in India. The latest version is reportedly made entirely from indigenous components and materials.

“The Sher may indeed be an efficient assault rifle and may eventually prove to be an excellent Indian-made weapon,” said Brigadier Bhonsle, “but it is not evidence that India designed it.” Rather, he said, after a long journey through imports, indigenous experiments, failed tenders, emergency purchases and technology-transfer agreements, India has finally learnt to manufacture an imported rifle entirely at home – an industrial achievement, certainly, but not a technological breakthrough.

That distinction matters.

After all, Atmanirbharta is meant to reduce dependence on foreign technology, not merely move the factory from Russia to India. The harder test, therefore, is whether Indian industry can conceive, design, develop and field the next generation of rifles without first importing the intellectual property, technology and basic design.

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