Not long ago, India’s energy security could be reduced to a single, sobering sentence: if the Strait of Hormuz closes, India’s lights flicker. That sentence was not an exaggeration. For decades, more than half of India’s crude oil imports transited that narrow, twenty-one-mile waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf — a chokepoint over which India had no control, no leverage, and no reliable alternative. Every time tensions rose in West Asia, oil ministers in New Delhi reached for the same anxious playbook. The world’s third-largest oil consumer was, for all its economic ambitions, deeply hostage to geography. That is changing, and the speed of that change in early 2026 has been remarkable.
When the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, 2026, triggering the most serious disruption to Strait of Hormuz shipping in modern history, New Delhi did not panic. It activated a plan. Within days, the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas was holding twice-daily reviews of the energy supply situation. Oil marketing companies were on the phone with suppliers across four continents. New LNG cargoes were en route from alternative sources. And at an inter-ministerial briefing on March 11, a senior Ministry official stood before the national press and delivered a statistic that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier: seventy percent of India’s crude oil imports are now arriving through routes that do not touch the Strait of Hormuz at all.
A Decade of Deliberate Diversification
The sixty-percent-to-seventy-percent shift in non-Hormuz sourcing did not happen overnight. It is the product of a decade of deliberate supply strategy — a patient, sometimes unglamorous expansion of India’s import basket from 27 supplier nations in the early 2000s to more than 40 countries today, spread across six continents. Where India once relied overwhelmingly on Gulf producers — Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and the UAE — it has steadily built relationships with African suppliers like Angola, Nigeria, and Libya; Latin American producers including Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela; and, most significantly since 2022, Russia, whose steeply discounted crude became a cornerstone of India’s import basket after Western sanctions reshaped global oil trade flows following the Ukraine war.
Russia’s role in the current crisis is a story of its own. Indian refiners had been purchasing Russian crude at approximately 1.0 to 1.2 million barrels per day in early 2026 — down from a peak of around 1.7 million barrels per day in 2025, reflecting US sanctions pressure, payment complications, and shipping constraints. But when the West Asia conflict erupted, New Delhi secured a thirty-day waiver from Washington allowing Indian refiners to continue purchasing Russian oil, with analysts now estimating that volumes could climb back toward two million barrels per day as refiners rush to lock in cargoes. This is the India economy in action: pragmatic, unsentimental, and acutely aware that energy security of 1.4 billion people takes precedence over geopolitical loyalty tests.
The LPG Problem — and the Government’s Response
Not every piece of India’s energy picture is as reassuring as the crude oil story. The country’s LPG supply situation is considerably more precarious. India imports roughly sixty percent of its LPG consumption, and nearly ninety percent of those imports have historically passed through the Strait of Hormuz — making cooking gas one of the most Hormuz-exposed segments of the entire Indian energy system. For a country where hundreds of millions of households still rely on LPG cylinders to cook daily meals, this is not an abstract supply chain vulnerability. It is a kitchen table issue.
The government moved quickly. On March 8, 2026, an order directed all refineries and petrochemical complexes to divert propane, butane, and related streams to maximise domestic LPG production — a measure that increased domestic output by approximately twenty-five percent within days. The entire domestic LPG production has been directed toward household consumers, with priority for hospitals and educational institutions in the non-domestic category. A three-member committee of executives from India’s major oil marketing companies — IOCL, HPCL, and BPCL — was formed the same week to oversee transparent allocation to restaurants, hotels, and commercial users. The government has also issued a Natural Gas Control Order under the Essential Commodities Act, establishing a clear priority hierarchy: piped gas and CNG receive full supply, industrial users get eighty percent, and refineries absorb the bulk of cuts at thirty-five percent to protect household consumers.
Strategic Reserves: Sufficient — But Not Comfortable
India’s strategic petroleum reserves are, as government officials are careful to note, adequate for the current situation — but honest analysts add the qualifier that they are not a long-term cushion of the kind that major economies like Japan or China can draw on. According to Kpler, India holds approximately one hundred million barrels of combined commercial crude stocks across storage tanks, strategic reserves at Mangalore, Padur, and Visakhapatnam, and volumes on ships already in transit. That translates to roughly forty to forty-five days of coverage — workable if the current disruption resolves in weeks, but strained if the conflict extends significantly beyond that window. Japan holds eight months of reserves. China holds reserves sufficient for one hundred and thirty days. India’s operational strategic petroleum reserves provide only about nine and a half days of standalone crude coverage, making the commercial inventory buffer critical.
The government is aware of the gap and has been addressing it. Plans are in place to expand India’s strategic reserves to hold crude oil sufficient for up to ninety days of consumption — a target that would represent a transformational improvement in the country’s ability to weather sustained disruptions. India is also expanding refining capacity by twenty percent by 2030, targeting 309 million metric tonnes annually, while simultaneously pursuing ethanol blending — which reached twenty percent in petrol in 2025, five years ahead of schedule — and accelerating electric vehicle adoption.
The Principle Behind the Policy
What distinguishes India’s approach to energy security in 2026 from the reactive scrambles of previous decades is the clarity of the governing principle. As India’s Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson put it in a statement that has since become something of a policy mantra: ensuring the energy security of 1.4 billion Indians is the supreme priority of the government, and all decisions on oil imports will be taken with that in mind. Three criteria — affordability, availability, and sustainability — are now described as operational commitments with auditable outcomes, not aspirational language. Every supplier negotiation, every routing decision, every strategic reserve calculation is filtered through those three tests.
The days when India’s energy security rose and fell with conditions in a single maritime chokepoint are over, government sources declared this week. That claim is not without caveats — the LPG Hormuz exposure remains real, the strategic reserves gap against peer nations remains significant, and a prolonged conflict could test every buffer India has built. But the direction of travel is unmistakable. A country that was once an oil import strategy learner is becoming, methodically and without much fanfare, one of the most sophisticated large-economy energy managers in the world. The forty-country supply basket is not just a statistic. It is the clearest measure of how much ground India has covered — and how deliberately it got here.
