On the last day of February, what was hitherto regarded as impossible, happened. What had been feared over decades but never materialised, the waterway that carries a fifth of the world’s crude oil, natural gas and LPG, closed. World crude prices surged within days, leaving every importing economy facing the same arithmetic. India imports more than 80 per cent of its crude and nearly 60 per cent of its cooking gas, most of it through that very strait, and the predictions wrote themselves: pumps would run dry within weeks, the cylinder would vanish from the kitchen and the economy would stall.
Months on, not one of India’s more than one lakh petrol pumps has run dry, no household has gone without cooking gas, the delivery cycle of the domestic cylinder is unchanged and growth has held. This Independence Day issue asks how India preserves its independence of action in a harder world. Definitions will differ across these pages; the one my ministry lived through is practical: the ability to keep every kitchen and every pump supplied through a disruption India did not cause. The most useful answer I can give is a plain account of how these months were managed.
They were managed, first, by daily work. From the opening week, supply was treated as a problem to be solved one day and one cargo at a time. Refineries ran above their rated capacity, additional kerosene was allocated to the states and LPG production was raised by 28 per cent within the first five days. Rumour moved faster than any cargo, and for a stretch, panic-booking was a bigger threat than supply itself, so the effort ran on both sides of the ledger: production and imports pushed up while demand was steadied.
Cooking gas was the sharpest front. Almost all of the imported share comes through the Gulf, and much of it stopped at once. Refineries that had never made cooking gas were reconfigured to produce it, the Essential Commodities Act was invoked for natural gas and the ministry accounted for every cargo, refinery and bottling plant each morning.
The consumer was insulated from the price shock, on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s clear instruction that the citizen be shielded whatever the cost to the exchequer. Central excise on petrol was cut from Rs 13 to Rs 3 a litre in late March, and on diesel, the fuel of freight and farms, to zero; retail revisions since have been minimal. A cylinder that would cost more than Rs 1,600 at the import-linked rate continued to reach an Ujjwala home at Rs 642, the state absorbing roughly Rs 900 on each one and close to Rs 600 on every other household cylinder.
The honest test of a supply system is what it never had to do. At no point in these four months were pumps rationed, number plates matched to days, offices sent home and factories and transport ran to their normal calendars through what may be the most severe energy disruption in recorded history. The emergency measures stayed in the drawer because the everyday system held.
None of it was done alone. Cargoes were secured from the United States, Norway, Canada and Russia in addition to Gulf sources, and our Gulf partners honoured every commitment they had made to us. Safe passage for more than 20 tankers was arranged through the Strait of Hormuz and the Indian Navy escorted our vessels through the conflict zone. India also joined the wider diplomatic effort to reopen the strait itself. No supplier relationship built over the past decade failed us in the weeks it mattered, and diplomacy, in those weeks, was measured in berthing schedules.
Preparing for the Crisis
The steps worked because the ground had been prepared long before. India entered the crisis with 23 refineries, more than 47,000 kilometre of oil and gas pipelines and a retail network serving nearly seven-eight crore LPG customers a day. Over a decade under Prime Minister Modi, the crude basket had been widened from 27 supplier nations to 41, the share of imports travelling beyond Hormuz raised from 55 per cent to 70 per cent, LNG import terminals doubled and strategic reserves filled at Visakhapatnam, Mangaluru and Padur while a second phase was approved at Chandikhol, with Gulf producers storing their own crude in Indian caverns. Little of it made headlines while it was being built; all of it mattered when the strait closed. The world’s fourth-largest refining nation, at 267 million tonnes a year and building towards roughly 310 by 2030, exported refined products worth $45 billion in 2024—25; a country like that is not easily brought to a halt and this one ended the quarter with foreign exchange reserves near $690 billion.
Months on, not one of India’s more than one lakh petrol pumps has run dry and no household has gone without cooking gas.
The same preparation runs through our own fields. Nearly 99 per cent of the Offshore Exclusive Economic Zone, once closed to exploration, is now open, the Andaman deep waters are being drilled for the first time and the latest acreage round offered 1.92 lakh square kilometres, over half in areas previously closed. Petrol at Indian pumps carries 20 per cent ethanol; blending now displaces 4.5 crore barrels of imported petrol a year, has saved close to Rs 1.97 lakh crore in foreign exchange and has paid over Rs 1.66 lakh crore to farmers, turning the annadata into an urjadata. With green hydrogen capacity being built towards five million tonnes a year by 2030, and the first plants already commissioned, a growing share of India’s energy is fuel that no strait can interrupt.
And these months were managed as one government. The states and municipal administrations worked with the oil marketing companies to keep supply moving and hoarding checked, ministries coordinated allocations daily and each major step was reported to Parliament as it was taken, beginning with a statement in the Lok Sabha in the second week of the disruption. An extraordinary situation was met by the whole machinery of the Indian state pulling in one direction, and the citizen saw none of the machinery, only the full cylinder at the door.
Key Learnings
What remains is to carry the learnings forward. The immediate ones are physical: the reserve programme at Chandikhol will be completed and commercial storage partnerships extended beyond it, so that reserve cover grows with the economy rather than behind it; the supplier basket will keep widening; and the domestic E&P campaign will continue until the basin has given its answer, because a discovery there would change our energy arithmetic permanently.
The longer learnings concern the fuels India will use next. Domestic fuels and the minerals and manufacturing behind the energy transition, from the National Critical Mineral Mission to processing at home, will be built with the same patience the last decade gave to crude. We will continue to work on what these months taught us. These months also left a method: act early, act daily and act together. The next disruption, wherever it comes from, should find an India still harder to disturb. That is how independence is kept: quietly, by preparation, year upon year.
(Views expressed are personal)
Hardeep Singh Puri Union Minister for Petroleum & Natural Gas
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE
(This story appeared in Outlook magazine’s August 31 issue, 'Whose Idea of India?', in which India’s noted public intellectuals, policymakers, cultural practitioners, political leaders, scholars and economists write in detail about the idea of India they believe can best secure the nation’s future as we celebrate 80 years of independence.)
