Examination of Country-Made Firearms (Kattas and Tamanchas)

A country-made firearm is any firearm manufactured outside a licensed factory, typically in a small cottage workshop using hand tools, scrap steel, auto parts and water-pipe stock. The Arms Act 1959 read with the Arms Rules 2016 makes such manufacture and possession a non-bailable offence under Sections 25 and 27, with the new Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023 layering on organised-crime aggravations under Section 111 where the recovery is tied to a syndicate.

The umbrella covers four common geometries. The katta is a single-shot pistol, usually with a break-action or screw-on breech plug, chambered for.315 (8 mm) or 12 bore but often forced to fire 7.65 mm or 9 mm rounds. The tamancha is the broader Urdu and Hindi term, used interchangeably with katta in FIRs and case papers, and sometimes applied to slightly more finished revolver-style copies. The desi pistol describes any locally fabricated handgun, including double-barrel variants. The pipe-gun is the crudest form, a length of steel water pipe with a sliding sleeve striker, intended as a one-shot disposable weapon. Locally fabricated muzzle-loaders still surface in tribal belts, loaded with loose black powder and a steel ball.

NCRB's annual Crime in India volumes consistently show that the overwhelming majority of firearms recovered in Indian criminal cases are country-made. The geography concentrates in known clusters: Munger (Bihar), Khargone (Madhya Pradesh), Aligarh and Khurja (Uttar Pradesh), and Sangli (Maharashtra). BBC and Indian press investigations have documented the Munger ecosystem in particular, where retired ordnance-factory workers and inherited blacksmithing skills feed a parallel arms economy that supplies the Hindi belt and beyond.

The visual examination almost always settles the question of whether a recovered weapon is factory or country-made. The construction signatures cluster around eight features.

1. Smoothbore unrifled barrel frequently a length of mild-steel water pipe or a turned auto-component (steering shaft, drive shaft). No lands, no grooves, no twist. A factory rifled pistol of the same nominal calibre will show clean, evenly spaced lands and grooves under a borescope.
2. Crude breech mechanism. Either a screw-on plug at the rear of the barrel, or a hinged break-action with a manually fitted hook. Headspace is set by eye, not gauge.
3. Oversized chamber. Chambers are reamed loosely so the gun will accept multiple cartridge sizes. A single katta may chamber.315, 7.65 mm and even 9 mm, with the smaller rounds sitting on a step or held by tape wrap. Obturation is partial, velocity is low, and fired cases bulge or split.
4. Improvised firing pin. Most often a steel nail with the head ground flat, occasionally a sharpened screw. The pin sits in a hand-drilled channel and strikes the primer through manual hammer fall.
5. Hand-filed or absent sights. Front sight is usually a small filed-down lug; rear sight is a notch or missing entirely. Point-of-aim shooting beyond two or three metres is not realistic.
6. Tape, wire and leather reinforcements. Insulating tape around the grip, copper wire bindings at the breech-barrel junction, leather wraps on cracked stocks. These are functional repairs, not decoration.
7. Hand-carved wooden grip. Local hardwood, file marks visible, no checkering or precision moulding. Frequently held by exposed wood screws.
8. Surface finishing absent. No bluing, no parkerising. Bare steel, often with file marks, drill swarf at the breech, and visible weld beads where pieces were joined.

These signatures matter in court because the examiner's report under Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam Section 39 expert opinionmust establish that the weapon is in fact a firearm within the Arms Act definition, that it is country-made (not a factory product), and that it is functional. Each finding rests on at least one of the eight features above.

The CFSL Chandigarh ballistics protocol for a recovered country-made firearm follows a five-stage sequence, with safety steps preceding the test fire.

1. Visual and photographic documentation
2. X-ray examination
3. Chamber casting
4. Test firing in a remote fixture
5. Comparison microscopy and case examination

The test-fire safety wrinkle is what separates country-made examination from routine factory-weapon work. Improvised barrels rupture, breech plugs fly backwards, and oversized chambers split cases violently. CFSL Chandigarh, the Delhi CFSL and most state SFSL ballistics units use a fixed remote firing rig inside a steel-and-concrete enclosure, with a lanyard or electric solenoid trigger. A 2014 internal memorandum across the Directorate of Forensic Science Services (DFSS) network formalised the no-handheld-test-fire rule for any recovered country-made weapon,

A country-made firearm violates almost every assumption that the standard range-determination workflow rests on. The oversized chamber gives partial obturation, so propellant gases vent around the case, muzzle velocity drops by 20 to 40 percent below factory specification, and pressure curves are unpredictable. Cases bulge, split, or back out partway. Primer strikes can be off-centre because the nail-head firing pin sits in a loose channel. Gunshot residue patterns are irregular: more soot, more unburnt powder, and a wider dispersion of nitrites on the target, because incomplete combustion is the norm.

The practical consequence for range determinationis that you cannot extrapolate from published factory data. The examiner must build a custom test-fire panel set using the actual recovered weapon, the actual cartridge type, and a series of known distances (contact, 15 cm, 30 cm, 60 cm, 1 m, 2 m). Modified Griess for nitrites, sodium rhodizonate for lead, and Walker filter-paper for nitrate patterns are then read against the suspect garment or skin photograph. Without the custom panels, any range opinion is indefensible in cross-examination.

Pellet and bullet dispersion is equally weapon-specific. Smoothbore barrels give wide, irregular dispersion at short distances because there is no spin stabilisation. A 12-bore katta firing improvised shot can show pellet spread of 30 cm at three metres, against perhaps 10 cm from a factory shotgun at the same range. Bullets keyhole frequently, striking the target side-on rather than nose-first, and yaw produces a star-shaped or slot-shaped entry wound that differs from the round entry of a rifled-barrel weapon.

The most powerful evidential question a country-made firearm raises is not "did this weapon fire that bullet" (which is hard on smoothbore) but "did this weapon come from that workshop". The answer relies on tool-mark comparisonof the file marks, drill swarf patterns, weld beads and lathe striations on the recovered weapon against tools seized in raids on suspected armourers.

Three categories of mark carry weight.Class characteristics include the chamber profile (one armourer's reamer leaves a recognisable taper), the weld pattern at the breech-barrel junction (TIG versus stick versus oxy-acetylene leaves different bead morphology), and the grip-screw spacing.Sub-class characteristics are the file-stroke direction and pitch on barrel exteriors and breech blocks, often consistent across a batch made by the same person on the same day.Individual characteristics are the random nicks and burrs left by worn tools on a specific weapon, which can be matched only against the actual tool that made them.

CFSL Chandigarh and several state SFSLs have built informal reference collections of seized Munger and Khurja workmanship, with photographic atlases of typical file patterns and breech geometries. A recovered katta is photographed under raking light, the breech is Mikrosil cast, and the marks are compared microscopically with reference exhibits. Where a tool seizure follows the weapon seizure, the comparison can sometimes place the weapon to a specific workshop, which feeds the BNS Section 110 organised-crime charge and supports MCOCA or UAPA invocations in larger investigations. The recovery, examination and report sequence is logged in the chain of custodyregister from seizure memo to court exhibit.