#India

India continues its quest to be the world’s largest customer for SIG Sauer’s SIG716i 7.62x51mm rifle. On 26 August, SIG Sauer announced that India’s Ministry of Defence had contracted for another 73,000 SIG716 series rifles. The first Indian order came in 2019, with a procurement of 72,400 rifles, worth a reported $72 million.

In Part 1 of this article, I talked about the history of the INSAS platform, Part 2 was dedicated to my personal experiences with these rifles as well as the opinions of soldiers I collected over the years. In the final article of the series, I will talk about upgrades of INSAS and the possible future of this weapon platform.

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.

The history of the Indian INSAS rifle is quite unique and has always been marked by controversy. And even if you never heard of it before, you can figure out its reputation just by reading headlines of TFB articles published in the last 10 years: