India has begun producing its own Kalashnikov assault rifle
The Russian-Indian enterprise Indo-Russian Rifles Private Limited (IRRPL) has manufactured and successfully tested the first prototype of the AK-203 assault rifle, made entirely from Indian components and materials.
As The Times of India reports, the enterprise is located in Korwa in the Amethi district. According to IRRPL CEO Major General Sudhir Kumar Sharma, the rifle underwent firing tests, including burst fire.
According to the Kalashnikov Concern company, the AK02-3 is a version of the Kalashnikov AK200 chambered for the 7.62×39 mm cartridge. A key feature of the "two hundredth" series rifles is the ability to mount modern sighting systems on a Picatinny rail (MIL-STD-1913) while maintaining the high reliability of the automatic mechanism.
IRRPL plans to produce several such rifles and hand them over to the Indian army for testing in September, as well as to increase capacity to the production of one AK-203 every 100 seconds. According to Sharma, this will make it possible to speed up the delivery of about 600,000 rifles to the military by almost a year.
In July 2024, Indo-Russian Rifles Private Limited handed over 35,000 AK-203 assault rifles to India's Ministry of Defense. By that point, the enterprise had completed the first phase of the project, and the facilities of the plant in Korwa had been equipped for a further increase in the level of production localization.
The AK-203 Kalashnikov assault rifle is a version of the AK-200 rifle chambered for the 7.62×39 mm cartridge used in the Indian army. India is the largest importer of Russian weapons. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Moscow supplies Delhi with about 36% of its armaments.
