Defence Procurement Board (DPB) has accorded Acceptance of Necessity (AoN) for procurement of Sniper Rifle as per details given below :

A quantity. of approx. 4,800 .338 Sniper Rifles with Telescopic Sight and 78 Lakh rounds of Lapua Magnum Ammunition is to be procured on ‘Buy (Indian)’ category.

The Request for Information (RFI) was initially floated on 07 Dec 2016 and responses were received for the same. However, in order to maximize participation, essential details of AoN along with RFI are being published on MoD/Indian Army website. Any Indian vendor who had not responded to the RFI earlier may express interest within four weeks from date of publication of details on MoD/Indian Army website for seeking Request for Proposal (RFP) and submission of bid. This is as per Para 35 of Chapter 2 of DAP-2020. Tentative date of issue of RFP is in Sep 2022.

Effective Range should not be less than 1,200 meters and an accuracy of less than equal to one MoA. The operating mechanism should be bolt action with inbuilt and applied safety mechanism. The rifles should have MIL-STD 1913 compliant picatinny rails with ability to mount clip on night sight.

As with reliability, in firing of 100 rounds, it should not suffer from more than two ‘Class-I’ or ‘Class-II’ and NO ‘Class-III’ stoppages as per ITOP 3-2-045 specifications and the overall weight (with Bipod, Empty Magazine and Telescopic Sight) should not be more than 9 kgs.

The sighting system with an open (iron) sight must be provided. The optical magnification is required to be of 5 - 25X with a minimum field view of 4deg, and should be of military grid reticule pattern with a stadia metric range finder.