Modi Govt Doubles Jet Fuel Prices for a Few Hours, Then Reverses; Indian Census Begins Five Years Late; CEC Gyanesh Kumar has Formal Power but has Lost Moral Authority
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Snapshot of the day
April 1, 2026
Sidharth Bhatia
After initially doubling jet fuel prices today to around Rs 2 lakh per kilolitre, India scaled them back hours later to around Rs 1 lakh per kl. Owing to the “extraordinary situation in global energy markets” caused by Iran’s retaliatory blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the “price of ATF [jet fuel] for domestic markets was expected to increase by more than 100%” on Wednesday, but India’s state-run oil marketing companies decided to pass a “partial and staggered increase of 25%” to airlines, the Union petroleum and natural gas ministry stated. However international flights will have to “pay for the full increase in ATF prices consistent with what they pay in other parts of the world”. Bloomberg’s Rakesh Sharma and Mihir Mishra report that Indian airlines, already dealing with low margins, had asked the government to see to it that OMCs do not pass the full increase on to them.
Commercial LPG prices have been hiked too, by 10.4% to Rs 2,078.5 per cylinder in Delhi. This is because the Saudi contract price has gone up by 44%, in turn as up to almost a third of global LPG supplies remain stranded in the Hormuz, the ministry said. As a result, India’s LPG imports in March fell by more than 45% compared to the previous month, with around 1.12 million tonnes of the gas making their way here compared to February’s 2.04 MT, Saurav Anand reports.
One of the five Indian-flagged LPG tankers that have successfully crossed the Hormuz since the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, the Pine Gas, had to wait for almost three weeks in the Persian Gulf before being able to do so. After idling there under night skies punctuated daily by missiles and drones the vessel was instructed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to take an unusual route along the strait so as to avoid Iranian mines. They were guided during the crossing by the Indian Navy and later escorted by it through the rest of the way home, Saurabh Sharma reports.
Even if 10% of domestic Indian LPG users to switch to electric stoves – as a lot of people have attempted to do since the conflict’s consequences started to become clear – and 70% of them in turn cooked their dinner simultaneously, the additional load on the power grid would be higher “than the power-guzzling potential of all data centres under construction globally”, Andy Mukherjee notes. Referring to India’s daytime solar power surplus against this background, he writes that “energy planners must decide what matters more: spending electricity on exporting AI tokens to the West, or keeping dosa and dal affordable for local families. Now is not the time to do both.”
Energy supplies are not the only thing whose transport across the Arabian Sea the conflict has affected. Today the mortal remains of 20 Indian nationals – including
