Three-panel illustration: a narrow sea strait blocked by warships, a kitchen with an empty LPG cylinder, and a petrol pump displaying rising prices -- connected by a single red line

By Ramachandran Rajeev Kumar — 2026-04-08

The Strait That Feeds India: How a Faraway War Reached Your Kitchen

India imports 60 percent of its cooking gas through a 39-kilometre-wide corridor between Iran and Oman. That corridor is now a war zone. This is not a story about geopolitics. It is a story about the price of lunch.

By Ramachandran Rajeev Kumar

Somewhere in a village in Madhya Pradesh this week, a woman who received a free LPG connection under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana dragged her old chulha back into use. The cylinder she was promised would arrive by March has not come. The dealer says there is a shortage. The shortage, he says, is because of something happening very far away.

That something is a war. On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched military operations against Iran. We are now on Day 39. In the intervening weeks, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned it would "deprive the US and its allies of the region's oil and gas for years." Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz -- the 39-kilometre bottleneck through which a fifth of the world's oil supply passes daily -- has dropped to near-zero. Brent crude hit $126 per barrel at its peak, and currently hovers between $110 and $116. India's crude basket surged from $69 per barrel in February to $113 in March -- a 64 percent increase in 30 days.

These are numbers. Here is what they look like when they arrive at your doorstep, your petrol pump and your kitchen.

The cylinder that didn't come

Start with the most intimate vulnerability: cooking fuel.

India has 332.1 million active domestic LPG connections. Of these, 104.29 million belong to Ujjwala beneficiaries -- the poorest families in the country, women who were burning cow dung and crop residue until the government handed them a gas cylinder and told them the chulha was behind them.

India imports roughly 60 percent of its LPG. Of those imports, approximately 90 percent transit the Strait of Hormuz. Do the arithmetic: about 54 percent of India's total LPG supply is exposed to a single maritime corridor that is currently under military blockade.

When the Strait effectively closed in early March, weekly LPG inflows fell an estimated 30 percent overnight. India's oil marketing companies scrambled. Domestic refinery output was ramped up by about 36 percent -- an impressive surge, but one that still leaves a gap. US LPG loadings destined for India have increased and now surpass traditional Gulf suppliers, but rerouting global supply chains is not like switching television channels. Ships take weeks. Contracts take longer.

The result, for now, is rationing by stealth. No official announcement, but delivery timelines have stretched. In several states, the gap between cylinder bookings and deliveries has widened from 3-4 days to 10-15. For a Ujjwala household living on daily wages, two weeks without cooking gas is not an inconvenience. It is a regression -- back to the smoke, the soot, the respiratory infections, and the hours spent gathering firewood that the programme was designed to end.

The government has responded with money: LPG subsidy allocations for FY 2026-27 have been scaled up, with approved OMC compensation for under-recovery losses standing at Rs 30,000 crore, and a separate Rs 17,500 crore support package. But subsidies compensate for price. They do not compensate for absence. You cannot subsidise a cylinder that has not arrived.

At the petrol pump: the silence of held prices

India's fuel prices have, on the surface, held steady. As of 7 April 2026, petrol in Delhi stands at Rs 94.77 per litre and diesel at Rs 87.67. In Mumbai, petrol is Rs 103.54. These numbers have barely moved since the crisis began.

This stability is not free. It is purchased.

On 27 March 2026, the central government slashed excise duty by Rs 10 per litre on petrol -- bringing it down to a skeletal Rs 3 per litre -- and zeroed out excise duty on diesel entirely. This is a staggering fiscal sacrifice. India collected roughly Rs 3.4 lakh crore from petroleum excise in FY 2025-26. At current consumption levels, zeroing diesel excise and slashing petrol excise means the government is forgoing somewhere in the range of Rs 1.5-2 lakh crore annually in revenue -- money that would have funded roads, schools, and rural employment.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman reassured the nation that India has 74 days of combined oil reserves (commercial stocks plus strategic reserves) and that inflation is unlikely to surge. The 74-day figure, however, deserves scrutiny. India's Strategic Petroleum Reserve -- the emergency stockpile, the last line of defence -- holds just 3.372 million metric tonnes of crude, about 64 percent of its total 5.33 MMT capacity. That translates to approximately 9.5 days of crude requirement. Nine and a half days. The rest of the 74-day figure comes from commercial inventories held by oil marketing companies, which are working stock, not emergency reserves. They exist to keep refineries running, not to weather a prolonged blockade.

For comparison: the United States maintains a Strategic Petroleum Reserve of roughly 400 million barrels -- about 40 days of total consumption. Japan holds 133 days. South Korea, 90. India's 9.5 days of strategic reserves is not a cushion. It is a prayer.

The government has plans to expand SPR capacity to 118 lakh tonnes by 2029. But 2029 is not 2026, and the Strait of Hormuz did not wait for India's infrastructure timeline.

The premium you are already paying

If the government is absorbing the crude price shock at the pump, where is the pain showing up? Everywhere else.

In the air. Air India announced a fuel surcharge hike effective 8 April -- today. The airline has moved from flat fees to a distance-based model: Rs 299 for short hops under 500 km, climbing to Rs 899 for domestic routes over 2,000 km. International surcharges are steeper: USD 50 for West Asia, USD 200 for Europe, USD 280 for North America and Australia. IndiGo has made similar moves. The underlying reason is brutally simple: average jet fuel prices rose to $195.19 per barrel in late March, nearly doubling from $99.40 at the end of February. When fuel is half your operating cost, you pass it on or you ground planes.

On your plate. Vegetable oil prices rose 6 percent year-on-year in March. India imports 55-60 percent of its edible oil -- palm, soybean, sunflower -- from Malaysia, Indonesia, the US, Russia and Ukraine. Higher crude prices raise shipping costs; container surcharges have reportedly reached $4,000. The oil in your samosa, the ghee in your dal -- their price is connected by a chain of freight costs, refining margins, and shipping lanes that runs straight through the Strait of Hormuz.

In the currency markets. The rupee has fallen to a record low of 93.94 against the US dollar. Foreign institutional investors offloaded shares worth approximately Rs 1,11,000 crore in March alone -- one of the largest monthly outflows on record. A weaker rupee makes every import dearer, creating a feedback loop: oil costs more in dollars, the rupee falls because India pays more for oil, and the next oil shipment costs even more in rupees.

In the growth forecasts. Moody's has revised India's 2026-27 growth forecast from 6.8 percent to 6 percent. An EY report estimates the Middle East conflict could lower India's real GDP growth by a full percentage point and push retail inflation up by 1.5 percentage points if the war continues into FY27. Inflation, which stood at 3.21 percent in February 2026, is projected by Moody's to average 4.8 percent in FY27 -- double the FY26 average.

These are not hypothetical scenarios. They are the arithmetic of a $110 barrel of oil working its way through an economy that imports 85 percent of its crude.

Warships in the Arabian Sea: when energy security becomes a naval mission

The defining image of this crisis is not an economic chart. It is a naval one.

In mid-March, the Indian Navy launched Operation Urja Suraksha. Five frontline warships -- including Visakhapatnam-class destroyers, among the most advanced in India's fleet -- were deployed to the northern Gulf of Oman to escort Indian-flagged LPG tankers and cargo ships. They do not enter the Strait of Hormuz itself, but they hold station on its western approaches, providing a security corridor for Indian vessels.

Pakistan, simultaneously, launched Operation Muhafiz-ul-Bahr on 9 March, deploying its own warships to escort Pakistan National Shipping Corporation vessels. India and Pakistan -- two nations that have fought four wars against each other -- are now running parallel naval escort operations in the same waters for the same reason: their people need cooking gas.

This is, by most accounts, the first time in modern history that countries have provided sovereign naval escorts for their own tankers through what is nominally an international waterway. It is a measure of how serious the disruption has become, and how little faith importing nations have in the international community's ability to keep the strait open.

The Indian Navy's deployment is professional, capable, and necessary. But it is also an admission: India's energy security now requires the continuous forward deployment of its most expensive warships. Each Visakhapatnam-class destroyer costs approximately Rs 4,000 crore. The operational cost of maintaining five warships on station in the Gulf of Oman -- fuel, crew rotation, ammunition readiness -- runs into hundreds of crores per month. This is not a sustainable posture. It is an emergency measure being treated as policy because the underlying vulnerability was never addressed.

We have been here before

India's relationship with oil shocks is not new. It is, in fact, definitional.

In August 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and oil prices surged from $17 to $41 per barrel -- a 140 percent spike -- India's economy buckled. Foreign exchange reserves fell to barely three weeks of import cover. The government imposed a 25 percent Gulf Surcharge on all petroleum products except domestic LPG. The external debt stood at $70 billion. The country was, in the assessment of the Washington Post at the time, "a fragile economy hurt by the Gulf crisis."

That crisis, of course, became the catalyst for the 1991 economic reforms -- the dismantling of the License Raj, the opening of the economy, the unleashing of forces that would eventually make India a $3.7 trillion economy. A generation of Indians grew up in the prosperity that oil shock ultimately produced, because leaders at the time chose to treat a crisis as an inflection point rather than a passing storm.

The 2026 crisis is worse in absolute terms. The 1990 oil price spike was 140 percent. The current one -- from $69 to $126 at peak -- is 83 percent, but from a much higher base and with India importing vastly more oil (5 million barrels per day versus roughly 700,000 in 1990). India's import bill exposure is not 72 percent higher, as it was in 1990. It is multiples higher, in an economy that is more globalised, more connected, and therefore more exposed to supply chain cascades.

The difference is that in 1990, India had no choice but to reform. In 2026, India has the fiscal capacity to absorb the shock temporarily -- zeroing excise duty, releasing subsidy packages, deploying warships. But absorption is not the same as solution. The question is whether this crisis will produce structural reform or merely an expensive holding action until oil prices eventually come down.

The architecture of dependence

Step back from the daily price tickers and the naval deployments, and a structural picture emerges.

India imports 85 percent of its crude oil. Of this, roughly 50 percent transits the Strait of Hormuz. India imports 60 percent of its LPG, with 90 percent of those imports using the same corridor. India imports 55-60 percent of its edible oil, with shipping costs tied to energy prices. India's strategic petroleum reserves cover 9.5 days.

This is not a diversification strategy. It is a concentration of risk that would make any portfolio manager wince. India's entire energy architecture -- the refineries calibrated for Gulf crude, the LPG terminals on the western coast, the tanker routes, the supply contracts -- is designed around the assumption that the Strait of Hormuz will remain open.

That assumption held for decades. It held through the Iran-Iraq War, through the Tanker War of the 1980s, through the Gulf War of 1990, through the Iraq War of 2003, through the US-Iran tensions of 2019. It held because the global consensus -- enforced, ultimately, by the US Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain -- was that Hormuz was too important to close.

The consensus broke on 4 March 2026.

India is not alone in its exposure. Japan, South Korea, and China are all major importers through Hormuz. But Japan and South Korea have SPR cover measured in months, not days. China has been aggressively diversifying -- overland pipelines from Russia and Central Asia, equity stakes in African and Latin American oil fields, and an SPR that some analysts estimate at 80-100 days. India has been talking about diversification for two decades. It has built 5.33 million tonnes of strategic storage capacity and filled 64 percent of it.

The Iran pivot: necessity, not strategy

In a development that would have been unthinkable six months ago, India has resumed buying Iranian oil and gas after a 7-year hiatus -- the first purchases since 2019, when India halted imports under US sanctions pressure. CNBC reported on 6 April that India is now actively importing from Iran, signalling the limits of its tilt towards Washington.

This is not a strategic pivot. It is a survival reflex. When the primary supply corridor is blocked, you buy from whoever is selling, geopolitics be damned. India's willingness to defy US sanctions pressure on Iranian oil -- even as Indian and American navies coordinate in the broader Indo-Pacific -- tells you everything about the severity of the situation. New Delhi has calculated that the cost of a domestic energy crisis exceeds the cost of American diplomatic displeasure.

It is also, in a darkly ironic way, buying from the very country whose actions helped cause the crisis. Iran's IRGC controls the Strait of Hormuz. Iran's oil is one of the few supplies that does not need to transit the strait. India is, in effect, paying the toll to the gatekeeper.

What must change

The crisis will end. Wars end, straits reopen, oil prices eventually decline. The temptation will be to treat this as a black swan, an unpredictable event to be survived and forgotten. That would be the wrong lesson.

India needs to act on three fronts, none of which are new ideas, all of which have been underfunded:

First, strategic reserves that actually provide strategic cover. Nine and a half days is not a reserve; it is a rounding error. India's planned expansion to 118 lakh tonnes by 2029 needs to be accelerated and fully funded. The target should be a minimum of 90 days, consistent with IEA member norms. Yes, it is expensive. It is cheaper than what India is paying right now.

Second, genuine supply diversification. This means more than signing new contracts with different Gulf states that all ship through the same strait. It means overland pipelines -- the long-delayed Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline may finally have a strategic rationale. It means more LNG import terminals on the eastern coast, configured for US and Australian supply. It means equity stakes in upstream oil assets in Africa, Latin America and Central Asia, as China has done for 20 years.

Third, accelerating the energy transition as a security imperative, not an environmental luxury. Every electric vehicle on Indian roads is one less vehicle dependent on Hormuz. Every solar panel on an Indian roof is one less unit of imported coal or gas. Every electric induction stove replacing an LPG burner is one less cylinder that needs to transit a war zone. The Ujjwala scheme gave 104 million families gas connections. The next programme should give them electric cooking alternatives that are immune to maritime chokepoints.

What the reader should carry away

This is not a distant crisis. It is an intimate one. The specific watchpoints:

The woman in Madhya Pradesh with her chulha does not know any of this. She knows only that the cylinder has not come. That is the domestic cost of India's Hormuz vulnerability: it is paid in the currency of regression, by the people who can least afford it, for an architectural failure that was always visible but never urgent enough to fix.

Until now.

BarathVector | Economy & Energy | 8 April 2026