Energy security has been one of the central concerns of Indian policy making for decades, and for good reason. Energy is the lifeblood of economic growth, and our inability to produce enough of it domestically has repeatedly shown up as strain on the country’s fiscal position and trade balance. Every time global oil prices spike, our import bill balloons, our current account deficit widens, and the rupee comes under pressure. This is not an abstract macroeconomic point — it eventually finds its way into fuel prices, inflation, and the fiscal room available to the government for other priorities.
Over the last decade, India has made genuine progress in building a renewable energy ecosystem. But when I look at the numbers, our dependence on imported fossil fuels remains overwhelming, and the high energy intensity of our growth model continues to shape and constrain our foreign policy and geopolitical choices — whether it is our relationship with Gulf oil producers, our purchases of discounted Russian crude, or how we navigate sanctions and shipping routes.
The execution gap
Some of India’s energy problem is structural. But a good part of it is about execution — and the data bears this out.
Crude oil production has been flat to declining for years. Domestic output has fallen from around 29.7 million tonnes in 2021-22 to about 28 million tonnes in 2025-26, even as consumption keeps climbing. As a result, our import dependence for crude has climbed to a record high — touching close to 89% in 2025-26, up from 85.5% five years earlier. India is now the world’s third-largest crude importer, and by some estimates is responsible for a quarter of all global oil demand growth over the last two years.
Natural gas tells a similar story of stagnation, followed by a partial recovery. Domestic gas production had been declining or flat for the better part of a decade before deepwater fields in the Krishna-Godavari basin brought some resurgence — output touched about 35 billion cubic meters in 2023, enough to cover roughly half our demand. But growth from here is expected to be modest, while LNG imports are projected to more than double by 2030, cementing our place among the world’s largest LNG importers.
Hydropower has barely moved the needle. Capacity additions have slowed to a crawl, and hydro’s share of our electricity mix has actually declined over the past decade as other sources — coal, solar, wind — have grown faster. In years of poor monsoon, hydro generation has fallen to multi-year lows, exposing how dependent this “renewable” source still is on rainfall.
Coal is the one fuel where India has genuinely scaled up domestic production — crossing the milestone of one billion tonnes in a single year for the first time, with output up by roughly 70-80% over the past decade. And yet we still import 20-25% of our coal requirement, mainly high-quality coking coal for steel-making and better-grade thermal coal that domestic mines cannot fully substitute. Even our biggest domestic energy success story still carries an import tail we haven’t managed to cut.
And then there is solar — the poster child of India’s renewable transition, and also the clearest illustration of “poor execution” in a different sense. India added a record amount of solar capacity in 2025, pushing installed solar capacity past 130 GW and non-fossil capacity past half of our total installed power capacity — a Paris Agreement milestone reached five years ahead of schedule. On paper this looks like a triumph. In practice, a meaningful share of this new capacity has had to be switched off. Grid operators curtailed roughly 2.3 terawatt-hours of solar generation in 2025 alone because the system simply could not absorb it — Rajasthan, our leading solar state, has seen curtailment cross 50% during peak sunlight hours in some months. The core problem is that we built generation capacity far faster than we built storage and grid flexibility: India’s battery storage capacity, at last count, was a fraction of a single gigawatt-hour — negligible compared to the scale of solar we have added. We built the tap before we built the tank.
Beyond Megawatts: What a holistic framework looks like
This brings me to what I think is the deeper issue: India’s energy conversation is almost entirely about generation. We debate gigawatt targets, auction results, and capacity additions. We rarely ask whether we are using energy well in the first place. A genuinely holistic energy security framework has to go beyond “how much can we generate” and ask “how little do we actually need to generate.”
Megawatts vs Negawatts. A unit of energy saved is worth more than a unit of energy produced, because saved energy avoids not just generation cost but also transmission, transportation and distribution losses along the way. Yet our incentive structures, our headlines and our policy attention overwhelmingly reward the “Megawatt” — new capacity commissioned — and barely acknowledge the “Negawatt” — demand that was never created in the first place. Efficiency doesn’t get a ribbon-cutting ceremony, but it deserves serious policy weight.
Living with nature, not just extracting from it. Our energy strategy treats nature purely as a source to be exploited — sun, wind, water, coal — rather than as a rhythm to live within. Shifting working hours to track daylight, dressing for our own climate rather than inherited colonial dress codes, and designing buildings for local climate rather than imported architectural fashion are not fringe ideas — they are low-cost, high-impact ways to cut energy demand at the source. Right now, most of this sits in the “nice to have” bucket rather than being part of how we plan cities and workplaces.
Reimagining industrial townships. Much of our energy demand — and our transport-related energy waste — comes from workers commuting long distances between where they live and where they work. Integrated, energy-efficient industrial townships, designed so the workforce doesn’t need to travel far, would cut transport energy use meaningfully while also improving quality of life. This needs to be a deliberate part of industrial policy, not an incidental outcome of land availability.
The water-energy nexus. Water and energy are tightly linked in India, more than we usually admit. Pumping groundwater, moving water through canals, and growing water-intensive crops in water-stressed regions all consume large amounts of energy. Rainwater harvesting, smarter crop choices suited to local water availability, and better irrigation infrastructure would reduce the energy footprint of our water systems — an angle that rarely features in energy security discussions, but should.
Public transport as an energy strategy, not just an urban amenity. Every private vehicle trip that could have been a bus or metro trip is, whether we frame it that way or not, an energy security decision. Improving last-mile connectivity, raising the comfort and reliability of public transport, and providing real incentives to use it are among the highest-leverage ways to cut transport energy demand — one of the fastest-growing components of our energy consumption.
Why this matters
None of this is to dismiss the real progress India has made — the coal production milestone, the solar capacity build-out, and the narrowing, if still incomplete, of overall primary energy import dependence, which has fallen from about 47% to 42% between FY17 and FY25. But the numbers also make clear that generation-side progress alone will not get us to energy security. Our oil and gas production is structurally constrained. Our hydro potential remains underexploited. Promotion of pumped storage is a step in right direction. And even our solar success is currently being partly wasted for want of storage and grid flexibility.
A holistic energy security framework has to treat demand reduction, climate-appropriate living, and efficient urban and industrial design as being just as central to energy security as the next gigawatt of capacity. Until Negawatts get the same policy attention as Megawatts, India’s energy security will remain a story of running hard just to stay in place.