



What should India’s near-term strategy for energy resilience look like? Here’s a climate-friendly outline
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.For a little over two months now, the world has speculated on the impact of the Israel-US-Iran war on the world economy. As the war’s disruption stretched on, concern began turning into panic over energy and food security. India is in a particularly vulnerable position—both directly, given its high energy dependence on West Asia, and indirectly due to the ripple effects of various impacts across the world.India’s large import dependence makes adaptive responses to economic and social impacts of the war enormously challenging, especially in the immediate time-frame of two years.
Approaches to re-evaluating and strengthening energy security in time periods beyond that would have greater degrees of freedom. At an aggregate level, the government has managed to limit price increases for most petroleum products by getting state-owned oil companies to absorb a good part of the crude-oil cost rise, while cushioning the rest of the impact on its own fiscal account. But last week’s steep price increases for commercial LPG have revealed the unsustainability of this approach.
Projections by global experts of the years needed to revert to ‘normalcy’ do not portend well for the country, highlighting an urgent need for strategic interventions that could have a large impact. Here is a quick recap of our most significant vulnerabilities. India imports about 90% of its crude oil, even if imports from West Asia are roughly half of this.
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