India’s Oil Minister Hardeep Singh Puri stepped in on Thursday evening to calm a nation that has been emptying store shelves of induction cooktops and panic-buying LPG cylinders, issuing a series of reassurances that the country’s energy supply position is secure. The statements are significant. They also invite scrutiny.
Here is what the minister said, and what context surrounds each claim.
What the Minister Said
In rapid succession on Thursday, the Oil Minister made four key assertions. Non-Hormuz crude sourcing has increased to 70% of India’s imports as of March 12. Refineries are operating at high capacity utilisation. Availability of petrol and diesel is fully secure. Crude supply position is secure.
On LNG, the minister said large cargoes are arriving almost on a daily basis, with India securing supplies from the United States, Norway, Canada, Algeria and Russia. LPG production has increased 28% in the last five days.
And on the panic itself, the minister was direct: the anxiety over LPG supply is driven by consumer anxiety rather than an actual supply shortage.
What Is Credible
The crude oil and petrol-diesel claims are the strongest part of the minister’s statement and are consistent with independent analysis. CLSA noted in its March 12 research note that petrol and diesel face lower supply risk because India is a net exporter of refined products. Indian refineries — Reliance’s Jamnagar complex, IOC’s Panipat, BPCL’s Mumbai refinery — are large, sophisticated and capable of processing a wide variety of crude grades from non-Gulf sources including Russia, the United States and West Africa.
The shift to 70% non-Hormuz crude sourcing by March 12 is a meaningful operational achievement. India has been diversifying crude import sources since the Russia-Ukraine conflict accelerated discounted Russian crude purchases in 2022, and that diversification has given Indian refineries the flexibility to pivot away from Gulf supply faster than most other major importers could manage. The minister’s claim on crude security is credible and supported by refinery utilisation data.
The LNG sourcing from the US, Norway, Canada, Algeria and Russia is also consistent with what energy traders have been reporting — India has been aggressively contracting spot LNG from non-Gulf sources since the crisis began, and the minister’s statement that large cargoes are arriving almost daily reflects genuine procurement activity.
The LPG claim is where the minister’s reassurance and the on-ground reality diverge most visibly — and it is the claim that matters most to the 300 million households that cook on domestic cylinders.
A 28% increase in LPG production in five days is a real number, but it needs to be placed against the baseline it is increasing from. India’s domestic LPG production from refineries covers approximately 40 to 45% of national consumption under normal conditions. A 28% increase in domestic production does not come close to replacing the imported volumes that have been disrupted. If domestic production was covering 40% of consumption and has increased 28%, it now covers approximately 51% — still leaving nearly half of normal consumption dependent on imports that are constrained.
The IEA’s March 2026 report, published the same day as the minister’s statement, documented that Gulf LPG exports of 1.5 million barrels per day have effectively stopped and that India is among the most exposed countries to this disruption. The minister and the IEA are not necessarily contradicting each other — the minister is describing what India is doing to respond, the IEA is describing the size of the hole being filled. Both can be true simultaneously.
The minister’s characterisation of the panic as driven by anxiety rather than shortage is the most politically loaded claim and the hardest to assess cleanly. Consumer anxiety and actual shortage are not always distinguishable from each other in real time — panic buying creates the shortage it fears, and a shortage that is real but manageable can be amplified by panic into something that looks more severe than the underlying supply data justifies.
What is observable is this: induction cooktops sold out 20 to 30 times their normal volume on Amazon and Flipkart this week. Blinkit and Zepto went out of stock across five major metros. Cylinder prices in Delhi crossed ₹913. These are not phantom signals of anxiety. They reflect real consumer behaviour in response to real price signals and real availability concerns at the distribution level, even if the aggregate national supply position is more secure than the panic suggests.
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