A quarter of the gas, gone in 10 days
The Strait of Hormuz is a strip of water barely 40 kilometres wide at its narrowest point, lying between Iran and the coast of Oman. Through it passes roughly a fifth of the world’s petroleum trade and a substantial share of its liquefied natural gas. When the direct military confrontation between the United States, Israel, and Iran began, shipping insurers raised their rates, tanker operators began diverting to longer routes, and several LNG and crude cargoes bound for Asia were cancelled or delayed within the first week.
For India, which imports over 85% of its crude oil and a growing volume of LNG through Gulf routes, the effect was immediate. Within 10 days, the country’s natural gas availability had contracted by an estimated 25–30%, from around 160 million cubic metres a day to somewhere between 120–130 million cubic metres.
The government responded with the Natural Gas (Supply Regulation) Order, 2026, a tiered allocation framework that protects households, transport, fertiliser plants, and LPG production at their full normal supply, while cutting refineries and power stations to 80%, petrochemicals to 70%, and industrial and commercial users to 65%. As a first administrative response to a supply shock of this scale, it is reasonable. It is also, in several important respects, incomplete.
The dhaba problem nobody is talking about
The allocation order divides the world neatly into households, which are protected, and commercial users, which are not. The commercial category bears the brunt of the 35% supply reduction. What falls into that category, among much else, is every hotel, dhaba, roadside eatery, canteen, and community kitchen in urban India.
This matters for a reason that should not need to be explained in 2026, six years after the COVID-19 lockdown made it visible to the entire country. India has an estimated 100 million internal migrants working in cities far from their home states. Most of them do not have home kitchens. They eat at the low-cost eateries within walking distance of construction sites, factories, and slum settlements. These establishments run on piped gas or LPG. A 35% supply cut does not merely inconvenience them; at their thin margins, it forces them to raise prices, reduce hours, or close.
In March 2020, when the lockdown was announced at four hours’ notice with no provision for migrant workers’ food access, millions of people started walking home. The images from those weeks — families on highways, children carried on shoulders, people dying on the road — are part of the national record.
The Natural Gas Order risks recreating those conditions — not through a sudden lockdown this time, but through a bureaucratic classification that shuts the dhabas before anyone in South Block has registered what that means for the people who depend on them. Affordable food service establishments should be immediately reclassified as protected food security infrastructure, with a guaranteed minimum gas supply and a parallel activation of state-run community kitchens for migrant workers in the largest cities.
The kharif season waits for no bureaucrat
India’s kharif agricultural season opens with sowing in April and May. The crops at stake — rice, maize, cotton, soyabean, pulses, groundnut — feed the country and sustain the livelihoods of its largest working population. Every one of them requires urea and nitrogenous fertiliser at the time of planting. Urea is manufactured from natural gas. The current order protects fertiliser plants at 100% allocation, which is correct. The question is whether that protection will hold, be actively monitored, and backed by adequate import stocks in case domestic production falls short.
The problem does not stop at fertilisers. Higher diesel prices, themselves a product of the petroleum route disruption, raise the cost of running irrigation pumps, tractors, and the trucks that carry produce from farms to markets. Pulses, which were already under import stress from disrupted Red Sea shipping routes from Australia and Canada, face a near-term supply gap that will hit urban consumers as a dal price spike. Cooking oil, 60% of which India imports, is exposed to the same freight disruption. Maize, which feeds both people directly, and the poultry industry that provides the protein for hundreds of millions of others, needs fertiliser and diesel at exactly the moment both are becoming scarce and more expensive.
The government has a narrow window before the sowing season locks in the consequences of inaction. Fertiliser buffer stocks must be assessed and import contracts fast-tracked from non-Gulf-dependent sources. Pulse reserves held by NAFED must be released into distribution. Emergency import orders for cooking oil should be placed through state trading corporations. And state agricultural departments must be told now, and not in May, what inputs will and will not be available and at what price, so that farmers can plan.
The scissors that cut the farmer twice
There is a particular cruelty in the way this crisis lands on Telangana and other states’ farmers. They are already contending with falling crop prices driven by American agricultural imports — cotton, soyabean, and maize entering Indian markets at prices subsidised by billions in US federal farm support.
Now the global disruption that is cutting their gas supply is simultaneously raising their input costs. The fertiliser bill goes up. The diesel bill goes up. The freight cost of moving produce to market goes up. The cold chain costs for horticulture exports to the Gulf go up, at exactly the time that Gulf shipping routes are disrupted and export cargo is being delayed or spoiled with no compensation. The price they receive for their crop falls; the cost of cultivation rises.
This is the scissors crisis, and it is entirely the result of policy choices that were made in Delhi without consultation with the states that are paying for them.
What opacity does to ordinary people
The most important lesson of the COVID-19 lockdown, and one that the governments appear resistant to learning, is that opacity is not a neutral administrative choice. It has consequences. When people do not know whether their local eatery will stay open, whether dal will be available and at what price, or whether the gas for their cylinder will arrive, they act on the worst assumption. They hoard, panic-buy, and send distress calls to their families, who then make their own precautionary decisions. The individually-rational behaviours of millions of people aggregate into the collective crisis the government was trying to prevent.
The antidote is not reassurance. Telling people that everything is under control, when they can see that it is not, accelerates distrust rather than calming it. The antidote is honest, specific, regularly updated information: weekly bulletins on gas supply and allocation by sector, daily mandi price monitoring on dal and cooking oil with public reporting, clear statements on which food establishments are protected and which are not.
A government war room at the PMO level — coordinating the Ministries of Petroleum, Agriculture, Commerce, Finance, and External Affairs — should be constituted immediately to produce and communicate this information, to assess India’s diplomatic options for protecting its agricultural export routes and Gulf worker welfare and coordinating the economic response before inflation, capital outflows, and rupee depreciation compound the energy shock into a broader economic crisis.
India is not without resources or options. It has buffer stocks, state trading corporations, a large diplomatic network, and an agricultural system that, if given adequate inputs in the next six weeks, will produce a kharif harvest sufficient to manage the food security challenge. The question is whether the government will use it, or whether it will wait until the dhabas are closed, dal price has doubled, and migrant workers are moving again.
The question Parliament should be asking
None of this is beyond the government’s capacity to manage. What it requires is speed, honesty, and the democratic legitimacy that comes from parliamentary engagement. The Natural Gas (Supply Regulation) Order, 2026 has not been debated in Parliament. India’s agricultural export losses, the Gulf worker welfare situation, and the diplomatic options available to protect Indian trade interests – including an honest assessment of whether India’s current strategic alignment constrains its energy flexibility – have not been placed before elected representatives. They should be. A joint parliamentary committee with real oversight authority over the crisis response, covering energy allocation, food prices, agricultural input supply, and Gulf disruption, would both improve the quality of decision-making and build the cross-party consensus that sustained crisis management requires.
Dr Narasimha Reddy Donthi is a researcher, campaigner, and an environmental justice activist. His writings and campaigns inform and capacitate people on environmental violations, economics, policies, and ways to secure justice.
Views expressed are the author’s own.