Gas Supply Concerns Mount as US-Israel Attacks on Iran Continue; From Cricket to Bihar, India's Political Families are Alive and Kicking
Odisha data for riots, mob lynching shows state’s steady advance in Hate League, Ban on humour to be tested in the Supreme Court
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March 10, 2026
Siddharth Varadarajan
The Modi government has invoked the Essential Commodities Act, 1955 to ration natural gas supplies in light of transport disruption along the Strait of Hormuz due to the US-Israeli war on Iran – now, in order of priority, the (i) domestic natural gas, CNG and LPG production sectors are placed at the top; (ii) fertiliser plants are to get natural gas at quantities equalling 70% of their six-month consumption average; (iii) tea industries, manufacturing and other industrial consumers are to get 80%; and (iv) other industrial and commercial consumers are to get 80%.
Oil and gas minister Hardeep Puri is holding daily briefings to assure the public that all is well but a crucial and bold assertion – ‘India does not need US permission to buy Russian oil’ – is being made only by anonymous ‘official sources’. The very fact that this claim is being put forward by “sources” and not by Puri renders it suspect and tells us all we need to know. As DB Venkatesh Varma put it in a recent lecture,
“It is easy to articulate strategic autonomy as a slogan; it is far more difficult to chart a pathway for its implementation in practice. External engagement and mutual dependencies are necessary but not at the cost of weakening national capabilities or perpetuating national vulnerabilities.”
Amid the throttling of its LNG imports the power ministry is considering bringing coal plants out of scheduled outages and asking generators to avoid shutdowns during the summer, Sethuraman NR reports. The government, he writes citing a source, has not received bids to supply 12,000 MWh of gas-based power supply for the summer even as its tender is to close in two days’ time.
The war has also caused coal and freight costs to go up, which in addition to the LNG shortage has been bad news for scores of small steel producers, Reuters notes. New Delhi, reports Nidhi Verma, is now buying LNG from outside West Asia.
Meanwhile …
Speaking of which, the Modi government has refused to disclose the full list of countries from which it imports crude oil, even as it defended its petroleum procurement diversification policy in parliament. Responding to an unstarred question from CPI(M) MP John Brittas in the Rajya Sabha, the Petroleum and Natural Gas Ministry said public sector oil firms source crude from 41 countries under the policy, aimed at strengthening energy security. It cited newer suppliers such as the United States, Nigeria, Angola, Canada,
