Clean-up drive at rifle factory reveals antiques

Kolkata: After the arrest of some employees and contract labourers by the Kolkata Police Special Task Force on charges of smuggling weapons and components, the management of Rifle Factory Ishapore (RFI) has gone in for a major overhaul. This has also led to the recovery of several thousand antique weapons buried under heaps of waste at three godowns. Some of these are muzzle loaders that may be nearly 200 years old.
“Police have been tracking the matter since 2008. A junior works manager and a contract labourer were arrested in 2017 for theft. They were granted bail and there was another theft. Our probe revealed that the British used a particular building as a dumpyard. As there was no formal handover after Independence, nobody knew what was in it. The miscreants took advantage of this and smuggled out some old weapons....” said D K Mahapatra, RFI general manager.
Among the items dumped were rejected barrels. While these may have failed standards set by other security forces, they were good enough for countrymade pistols. It was found that nearly 1.6-1.7 lakh rejected barrels of various size were lying among the waste.
“The barrels weighed about 186 tonnes. Earlier, they used to be sold as scrap. Over the last 6-7 months, we got them melted at the Metal & Steel Factory. Nearly 230 tonnes of discarded components and old weapons were also melted and converted into ingots weighing 1,800 kg each. These will now be auctioned,” Mahapatra said.