India has been forced to reduce its requirement to just 1,800 sniper rifles and 2.7-million ammunition-less than a third of its army’s total need — driven by budgetary pressures and the need to fast-track the purchase for counterinsurgency troopers posted in Jammu and Kashmir and North East.
The 1.3 million-strong Indian Army has had to prune its original requirement of 5,720 sniper rifles and 10.2-million ammunition, which would have cost the state exchequer Rs 1,000 crore ($140 million), so that it could prioritize arms purchases and get more modern weapons for its troopers, people with knowledge of the matter told Defence. Capital today.
The Indian Army has on Nov. 11 issued a Request for Information (RFI)-an initial document for assessing available equipment and technology in the market for a specific requirement- indicating its search for buying the lowered quantity of 8.6mm sniper rifles and .338 Lapua Magnum ammunition in one year.
The Indian armed forces have 450,000 infantry soldiers, of whom only half go into ground battle and a very small number of them use the sniper rifle to take out specific enemy targets through precision firing. The sniper rifles purchase move is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s $250-billion modernization plan for the Indian armed forces, as the infantry soldiers continue to face the brunt of deadly attacks in disputed border areas such as Kashmir and the North-East.
The earlier effort by the Indian Army to buy 5,720 sniper rifles in a process that began in Feb. 2018 through a Rfiand a Request for Proposal (RFP in defense parlance, but tender in common usage) in Sep. 2018 was scrapped in July this year after four vendors -US-based Barrett and MSA Global, Indonesia’s Pindad PT and Russia’s Rosoboronexport -failed to meet technical requirements, including technology transfer for manufacturing the ammunition by local industry.
This story is from the November 25, 2019 edition of News behind the News.
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This story is from the November 25, 2019 edition of News behind the News.
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