“I would be very surprised if this .22 revolver worked. The quality of Indian arms varies significantly. Their new combat rifle, the INSAS 5.56 NATO has had MAJOR quality issues. It’s so bad, troops were issued AKMs.”
Maybe it works just well enough. Revolvers are pretty simple mechanisms. Would they do worse than the RG-14? I had one of those. It was pretty awful, but it would go bang with fair regularity. If you fired it single action only, you could, with skill, concentration, and considerable effort, get decent accuracy.
You would think for $500, an Indian arsenal would be able to produce a revolver a little better than a bottom of the line German design...
“Decent” accuracy may be stretching it a bit. As I recall, I could get six shot groups of about 2 inches at 50 feet.
The sights are fixed; so I also had to apply a correction of about 4 inches to the left and 4 inches low, as I recall through the fog of 30+ years ago.
I am not endorsing the RG, just illustrating that revolvers tend to be fairly forgiving creatures.
That is not to say the Indians cannot built good equipment. I have a Rifle Factory Ishapore-built No. 2A1 rifle (7.62 NATO version of the No. 1 Mk III SMLE) and it is a very solid, accurate rifle. (The 2A1 is NOT a converted war production .303 SMLE; it is a new rifle built of mondern materials.) However, without the pressure of a vital customer base to influence quality control, this attention can often not get the attention that it should.
As you say, revolvers are pretty simple creatures and there's no reason why India can't build one better than the cheap German RG-14. (Cheap it may have been, but the RG-14 did hold together and shoot.) I'd hope that an Indian customer, after jumping through all sorts of bureaucratic hoops, finally plunks down his 5,000 rupees ($72.41 USD) and gets a quality pistol. If I didn't, I'd be p.o.’ed. [Here's a thought: maybe the Germans could sell RG-14's to India. Nah.]