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........

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