Indian Army Plans to Upgrade INSAS Rifle. Part 2 – My Experience

In the first part of this article, I talked about the history of the INSAS rifle and the problems that were described in the Indian press. After reading countless articles about INSAS, I had a chance to travel to India and asked every Indian serviceman I met about those problems.

Here is what I was told: the stories are true, and one of the main concerns for soldiers was magazines. Not just cracks in the magazine body – locking lugs breaking off.

What made things worse was that if a soldier had a broken magazine, the price of the magazine was taken from his salary. As one of the officers said, quote: “That is how you make the soldier to hate his gun”.

Some officers told me that the receiver cover of INSAS does not hold zero. This same complaint was also published by the Times of India:

Zeroing (adjusting the sight for aim) has to be done each time the rifle is opened to clean or for any other reason. Lack of proper zeroing hampers the working of night vision device.

The Indian army still trains in bayonet fighting, so soldiers were complaining to me about bayonets bending during practice and lugs not retaining bayonets properly. The stock would break during hand-to-hand combat practice.

There were a lot of complaints about the selector: the lever being too soft and switching on or off accidentally.

But that is not all, often a rifle would fire single shots when the selector is in 3-shot burst mode and vice-versa. At times, rifles also fired in long bursts, even though full auto mode is limited to 3 shot burst only.

Many officers complained that stoppages were so bad that they had to put the rifle on the ground, barrel up, stock pressed to the floor, and try to rack the bolt carrier using their foot.

This motion reminded soldiers of a motorcycle Kickstarter, so they started calling the INSAS rifle “Bajaj”, which is a famous brand name for the factory that makes scooters in India.

Soldiers never complained about the accuracy of the rifle. In fact, the accuracy standard of INSAS from the factory is pretty good – 12 centimeters (about 4.7 inches) at a hundred meters, which is slightly better than AKM (15 centimeters at the same distance) and similar to the M4 accuracy standard.

Personal experience with INSAS

After listening to all those stories, in 2017, I finally had a chance to shoot INSAS myself when I was doing some weapon testing at the Ishapore Rifle factory near Kolkata. Unfortunately, I could not film the process, but it still lives in my memory.

I picked up the magazine and locked it in the mag well, racked the bolt carrier, aimed at the berm, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Somehow, the round did not load from the magazine, so I loaded the rifle again.

I shot a total of three magazines, 20 rounds each, and got three stoppages, one for every magazine. Each time it was a failure to feed of some kind, which I managed to remedy by taking out a magazine, racking the bolt a few times, and loading again.

If you count the initial failure to load, that would mean I had four stoppages in 60 rounds. I would shoot more rounds that day, but because of all the stoppages, I felt that I overstayed my welcome.

From the type of stoppages I had when I shot INSAS (and considering that they were all pretty much the same), I can assume that they were likely caused by badly designed magazines.

Another memory I have – the recoil of INSAS felt weird. It is a 5.56 rifle, but the muzzle rise felt closer to 7.62×39.

And it is not like I don’t know how to control recoil – during the same trials, officers from a local branch of “Black Cats”, a famous Indian counter-terrorist unit, were quite impressed with my recoil control in full auto.

To this day, I have no explanation for this phenomenon of the felt recoil of INSAS, perhaps it was just a subjective feeling and nothing else.

Is there a solution?