Indigenous grenades may soon replace Army’s vintage ones
Finally the Indian Army may be able to replace the World War II vintage HE36 hand grenades with new ones developed indigenously. After a joint research with Chandigarh-based Terminal Ballistics Research Laboratory (TBRL), Ordnance Factory Board (OFB), has closed in on the final product. Though some fine tuning remains.
After successful laboratory production, an order has been placed with the Ordnance Factory Khamaria to make 10,000 pieces of the multi-modal grenade (MMG), claimed to be better than the HE36. The HE36 takes four seconds to explode after the grenade’s pin is taken off. In MMG, the delay has been reduced and it has better lethality. It can be used for offensive and defensive purposes by changing its lethality. However certain modifications are still needed, said a source from the ministry of defence.
Sources said even after sucessuful results, further batches could not achieve a similar time lag. The time lag is fixed at two ends. The grenade has to maintain a certain gap for exploding once the pin is taken off. At the same time, it has to blast within a specific time frame.
For example, if it there has to be a delay of two seconds, the grenade should explode within a upper limit of three seconds and not more. In this case there are certain issues in synchronizing the timings. Once the issue is resolved in the first batch, an order running into lakhs of pieces may be placed, the source said.
The OFB had come across complaints from troops over ineffectiveness of HE 36 grenades. The major defect was that they failed to explode even after the pin was taken off. This was because the detonator in the grenades used to give away. Often, by the time the grenade was issued to the soldier, the detonator was rendered useless. TOI had reported the matter in 2009.
Col U H Rathore (retd) said he had come across better grenades with Kashmir militants when army’s own grenades misfired. Rathore also said it was probably too late to develop the MMG, which is supposed to be matched with the under barrel grenade launchers in 5.56 Insas rifles. “Apart from being thrown by hand, grenades are also launched using rifles. Insas, which had a problem in firing grenades, is also being discarded by the Army,” he said indicating that the new grenades would need to be modified again to suit any new rifle army might acquire.
Indigenous grenades may soon replace Army’s vintage ones | idrw.org
