Armoured Vehicles Nigam Limited

Armoured Vehicles Nigam Limited, which trades as AVANI, is the armour half of the old Ordnance Factory Board. It was incorporated in 2021 as one of seven state-owned defence companies created when the board was corporatised, and it took over five production plants plus three training institutes. The corporate office is at Avadi on the outskirts of Chennai, next to Heavy Vehicles Factory, which builds and overhauls main battle tanks. Engine Factory Avadi sits alongside it. Ordnance Factory Medak in Telangana builds tracked infantry vehicles and their derivatives, Vehicle Factory Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh makes wheeled military trucks and armoured wheeled platforms, and Machine Tool Prototype Factory at Ambernath near Mumbai produces gearboxes, launchers and precision assemblies for the other plants.

Battle tanks are the flagship. Heavy Vehicles Factory assembles the T-90S Bhishma under Russian licence, overhauls the T-72 Ajeya fleet, and produces the Arjun, the indigenous 58-tonne design with Kanchan composite armour, a 120 mm rifled gun and an Indian fire control system, in its Mark 1 and improved Mark 1A forms. The Mark 1A brings in a redesigned turret with explosive reactive armour, a gun-launched anti-tank missile, a commander's panoramic sight and a remote weapon station. Variants built on the same chassis include a bridge layer tank and an armoured recovery vehicle. Engine Factory Avadi supplies the powerpacks that go with all of this, producing the V-46-6 for the T-72, the V-92S2 for the T-90 and the UTD-20 for the infantry combat vehicle, along with gearboxes and transmission assemblies.

The Medak plant makes the Sarath, the Indian-built BMP-II, and a long tail of variants: the BMP-IIK command version, an armoured ambulance, a nuclear, biological and chemical reconnaissance vehicle, a carrier mortar tracked vehicle and an armoured engineering reconnaissance vehicle for river and terrain survey ahead of an assault crossing. Its 30 mm Medak gun was navalised as the CRN-91, a gyro-stabilised close range naval mount now common on Indian patrol vessels and landing ships. Jabalpur contributes wheeled output: the Stallion and Super Stallion truck families built with Ashok Leyland, the LPTA range, the Aditya mine protected vehicle and armoured conversions of light commercial chassis, along with the Sharang programme that up-guns the Army's 130 mm M-46 to 155 mm and 45 calibres, lifting range past 36 kilometres. Ambernath adds the Kavach Mod-II naval chaff decoy launcher, elevating and traverse gearboxes and artillery fuzes. A separate export catalogue puts the Arjun, the T-72 bridge layer and a 14.5 mm artillery training device in front of foreign buyers. Periodic overhaul of in-service armour is a steady second income stream, and the group flagged a batch of rebuilt T-72s out of Jabalpur in 2026 as evidence that the corporatised structure had not slowed throughput. The customer list is short and concentrated. Almost everything AVANI makes goes to the Indian Army, with naval guns and decoy launchers to the Indian Navy and Coast Guard. Exports and overhaul work are handled from the same units, and an active challenge programme under the government innovation scheme feeds new suppliers into the group.