Small arms, big demand

Smruti Deshpande

For decades, India’s armed and paramilitary forces have faced a tremendous shortage of small arms because of heavy dependence on foreign firms and little procurement. A number of times when the country’s forces faced security challenges and were in desperate need of personal arms, foreign firms cancelled contracts that were already signed, leaving the forces in the lurch.

Small arms by DRDO

In June 2020 during the standoff with China, one of the army’s units faced a critical shortage of weapons. The Belgian small arms manufacturer, FN Herstal (FNH), cancelled the contract to supply 1,500 small arms to the Special Frontier Force. The contract was worth Rs 70 crore for the P90 personal defence weapons and two variants of its SCAR assault rifles. Earlier, the German company, Heckler & Koch, which was supposed to supply the MP5 sub-machine guns to state police forces to replace their World War-II vintage small arms after the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai.

Most recently in May 2022, the Indian Ministry of Defence (MoD) decided against inking a Rs 700-crore repeat order it had approved in 2020 for 72,400 Patrol Sig Sauer assault rifles from the US because of operational glitches with the first batch of the rifles India had purchased a year before. The Sig Sauer rifles are being used by the army’s units deployed along the line of control in Kashmir.

In September 2022, the army repeated its attempt at procuring close-quarter carbines and sought information from domestic arms manufacturers about the possible supply of more than 4,25,213 guns. For a force that is engaged in counter insurgency, it has been operating without such carbines for nearly three decades now. In its request for information to Indian vend