The Samudra Manthan scheme could lower the risks of frontier drilling and attract fresh investment, but rising demand means India will remain reliant on imported energy.
India’s new offshore exploration push may improve the odds of fresh oil and gas finds, but it is unlikely to free the country from its heavy reliance on imported energy, according to Rajeev Lala, director of upstream strategies and transformation at S&P Global Energy. In an interview with ThePrint, Lala said the Samudra Manthan scheme shifts some of the early financial risk away from companies by helping to cover the high-cost, high-uncertainty phase that comes before any commercial discovery. The Union Cabinet has approved the programme with an outlay of ₹84,084 crore, aiming to expand seismic surveys, deepen offshore drilling and build shared production infrastructure through to FY2030-31.
That matters because India has long struggled to turn offshore potential into large-scale production, even with a history of upstream activity. Lala said the scheme could draw in more players and encourage new approaches in both established and less-explored basins, especially on the western and eastern coasts. S&P Global Energy has said the initiative is designed to reset the economics of frontier drilling by reducing the burden on companies, with the broader goal of raising domestic output over time. Still, the competition for exploration capital is intense: Lala noted that more than 40 countries are preparing or running bidding rounds, which means India will have to compare favourably on geology, policy and commercial terms if it wants to stand out.
Even if the scheme leads to sizeable discoveries, Lala argued that India’s import dependence would only fall marginally because overall energy demand is still rising. Domestic production could trim the import bill, support industrial activity, create jobs and deepen engineering capability, but it would not erase the need for foreign crude. The pace of any payoff will also vary by basin: near-field exploration, where infrastructure already exists, can move faster, while frontier areas often take much longer before they produce anything commercial.
Lala said the latest tensions around the Strait of Hormuz and the conflict involving the US and Iran have shown why India needs wider energy optionality, not just more oil wells. He argued for diversifying suppliers, expanding strategic petroleum reserves and keeping investment flowing across the energy chain. India’s large refining system gives it some flexibility because it can process crude from different sources and export products abroad, helping it adapt when one supplier becomes more expensive or less reliable. That flexibility, he said, means a spike in purchases from one country does not automatically amount to permanent dependence on that supplier.
The same crisis, Lala added, has highlighted weaknesses beyond crude oil. He said higher refinery output helped ease some of the strain in liquefied petroleum gas supplies, but could not eliminate the need for imports. Liquefied natural gas presents a different challenge: rather than a global shortage, the immediate problem is disruption to long-term contracts and logistics, including pressure on trade routes and facilities linked to Qatar. Looking ahead, he said Venezuela could become a more important source of crude for India, but only after infrastructure, staffing and payment disputes are resolved, and that will take time. In his view, India’s energy security needs to be judged across the whole system , from crude to LPG and LNG , rather than through a single fuel or reserve policy.
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