As households deal with LPG shortages and industries deal with gas shortages, India’s Gen Z is experiencing its first taste of energy shortages. Unfortunately, energy shocks are nothing new given India’s economic history. Daniel Yergin writes in The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, that the history of oil is a “story of booms, busts and recurring shocks”. Yet with each boom, the memory of the last shock fades, and the urgency it once created dissipates from institutional thinking.In the early 1970s, India was only beginning to mainstream oil as it gradually replaced coal and biomass in several applications. Petroleum consumption was modest at about 22 MTPA, with over half imported. Its use was largely concentrated in diesel for irrigation and transport (~40 per cent), kerosene for household lighting and cooking (~20 per cent), and furnace oil for industry (~25 per cent).AdvertisementMajor geopolitical disruptions in West Asia — the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the 1979 Iranian Revolution — sent tremors through global energy markets. Crude prices surged from $1.5/barrel in 1970 to $35/barrel by the decade’s end. The era of cheap oil had ended; pricing power had begun shifting from international oil companies to oil-producing states.Supply disruptions and soaring import bills forced a rethink of energy policy. The idea was simple: Conserve oil, or avoid using it where alternatives exist. One major push was the electrification of railways and agriculture to reduce dependence on subsidised diesel.Coal replaced residual heavy oils as industrial fuel in many processes. This led to the expansion of secondary and tertiary refining processes, allowing refineries to extract more high-value products, like petrol or diesel, from residual feedstocks. Fertiliser manufacturers were pushed towards exploring alternative feedstock such as coal. Dankuni Coal Complex was created to explore coal gasification. These structural changes were supported by state-led oil conservation campaigns, with public slogans like “Save the last drop”.AdvertisementThis movement towards conservation was short-lived. The 1980s brought major domestic oil discoveries like Mumbai High. Domestic production rose sharply and India was able to reduce its import dependence to about 30 per cent — a level it has never reached again. Global oil prices softened, the sense of crisis faded.During the 1980s, oil demand grew at 7-8 per cent annually, a pace India had never seen before. This marked a gradual shift in the country’s oil habits. Diesel-based power generation expanded, and naphtha was diverted to fertiliser production without much concern about efficiency. Efficiency standards for heavy-duty vehicles remained weak.Amidst this complacency, the Gulf War in 1991 came as a major shock. Import dependence was still around 40 per cent, but the global price spike was far less severe than those of the 1970s. However, the war led to declining remittances, expensive repatriation flights and high global oil prices, precipitating India’s balance-of-payments crisis. The crisis eventually triggered the economic reforms of the early 1990s.Policy responses during this phase were also markedly different from those of the 1970s. The emphasis shifted toward securing more oil supplies rather than reducing dependence. India created a strategic oil reserve and pushed ONGC Videsh Limited to acquire equity oil assets overseas as further insurance.The late 1990s proved challenging for India’s oil production as well. Output from ageing fields began to decline. As domestic production stagnated and demand continued to grow, import dependence began rising again. By the turn of the millenium, it had widened to about 65 per cent.What was missing, however, was a renewed push toward demand restraint or fuel substitution. In contrast, several European and East Asian economies invested heavily in efficiency improvements and alternative fuels.Gas discoveries in the Krishna-Godavari (KG) basin in the early 2000s began India’s increasing enthusiasm about gas. India began locking itself into lumpy gas infrastructure — cross-country pipelines, city gas distribution (CGD) networks and gas power plants. These developments created a sense of comfort around natural gas as a “bridge fuel” that industries could burn with less pollution. Current disruptions reveal the fragility of these assumptions.Fast forward to 2025, and India’s oil consumption has expanded nearly tenfold since the 1970s — rising from about 22 to roughly 240 MMTPA. Yet oil’s share in the country’s primary energy mix has remained broadly stable, hovering between 25 and 30 per cent for half a century.The real concern lies elsewhere. Import dependence is now at its highest level — close to 90 per cent, nearly double what it was in the 1980s.Rising natural gas penetration led to new dependencies. Import dependence has risen from about 25 per cent in 2010 to nearly 55 per cent now, reflecting the gas lock-ins India built over the past two decades. This exposure is also more fragile, since India lacks strategic gas reserves. Gas trade is concentrated among a few suppliers, half of India’s LNG imports coming from one country — Qatar.you may likeIndustrial and commercial consumers have repeatedly borne the brunt of supply disruptions — whether fertilisers, petrochemicals or small-scale manufacturing. Public-sector oil marketing companies often become casualties, too, unable to fully pass on price increases despite their officially stated right to pricing freedom. Prolonged crises have a way of curtailing commercial freedoms.The lessons from the previous oil shocks have been absorbed only piecemeal. Alternatives are slowly emerging across sectors, but the larger victory would be to bend the consumption curve before dependence deepens further. The ideas are not new; what has been missing is the discipline to pursue them. The most pragmatic road to energy atmanirbharta passes through conservation, efficiency and electrification — just as it did in the 1970s.Das is a PhD candidate and Chandra is assistant professor, IIT Delhi School of Public Policy