India’s energy policy cannot be dictated by Eurocentric carbon targets designed for wealthy, post-industrial economies. The recent conflict involving Iran and Israel has already exposed India’s energy vulnerability. How long can India keep its kitchens burning and its trucks moving if global supplies are disrupted? The answer is sobering. India has barely 21 days of LPG storage and roughly 74 days of crude oil cover. Nearly 90 per cent of crude requirements are imported, leaving the economy exposed to geopolitical shocks. Thin strategic reserves make energy security fragile.
This vulnerability reflects a broader policy drift — partly driven by copying Western energy prescriptions that do not suit India’s economic realities. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has been ignoring the vulnerabilities of countries like India, struggling to progress. Or is it a Western weapon? Countries such as Germany and France industrialised for two centuries using coal, oil and gas. Their per-capita incomes are high, their energy demand largely saturated, and their grids stable. Having already built wealth, they can now afford costly transitions to electric vehicles, battery storage and carbon taxes. India cannot.
Diesel vehicles have been found to have longer lives and have better fuel efficiency than petrol, and the new diesel is far less polluting. India needs to scrap the impractical policy of junking diesel vehicles based on age and not efficiency. It’s an impractical decision that harasses India’s poor and the middle class the most. Public discourse often portrays diesel as the villain of India’s energy story. In reality, it remains the backbone of the economy. Diesel moves nearly 70% of India’s freight, powers tractors and irrigation pumps in agriculture, runs buses and supports backup power for industries. Since the shift to Bharat Stage-VI standards in 2020 — equivalent to Europe’s Euro-6 norms — sulphur content has dropped from 50 parts per million to just 10 ppm, an 80% reduction.
From an efficiency standpoint, diesel remains difficult to replace. A litre of diesel typically delivers 10 to 15% more usable energy and better mileage than petrol. For heavy vehicles such as trucks, buses and tractors, this translates directly into lower fuel consumption per kilometre and reduced logistics costs. In a country where trans portation costs feed directly into the prices of food, construction materials and consumer goods, that efficiency acts as an important anti-inflation buffer. There is also a crucial foreign exchange dimension to the diesel debate and rupee slide. India imports crude oil but refines it domestically at scale, extracting multiple petroleum products from each barrel. By maximising the use of diesel already produced in Indian refineries, the economy extracts greater value from the same import bill.
India also extracts significant economic value from refining crude domestically. Major Indian refiners operate a sophisticated refining network that supplies domestic demand while exporting surplus fuel — often more than 600,000 barrels of diesel per day to markets in Asia, Africa and Europe.
Replacing this infrastructure overnight with battery-based systems is neither economically nor technologically feasible. EVs depend on imported lithium, cobalt and rare minerals. Large-scale electrification also requires massive investments. In effect, dependence on oil could simply be replaced with dependence on imported minerals. Moreover, battery manufacturing and disposal carry their own environmental costs. Mining lithium and cobalt is resource-intensive, and recycling infrastructure remains limited worldwide.
Energy transitions succeed only when alternatives become genuinely affordable, reliable and scalable. Until that point, fossil fuels — particularly diesel — will remain central to India’s development story. Energy policy, in other words, must follow economic reality rather than moral signalling. Decarbonisation can proceed through effi ciency improvements and gradual diversification, but for cing abrupt transitions before alternatives become viable is damaging both economic stability and social welfare. Fossil fuels may not represent the distant future of global energy, but for a developing economy striving to sustain growth and mobility, they remain indispensable.
