India’s efforts to diversify oil sources reveal that, despite broadening its supplier base, geopolitical and geographical vulnerabilities remain, exposing the limitations of supply diversification as an energy security strategy.
India’s oil buying strategy has become a useful test case for a bigger argument in global trade: spreading risk across more suppliers does not automatically make a country secure. That is the thrust of a recent Indian Express opinion piece, which notes that India now relies on imports for more than 85% of the crude it burns and has already shifted its sourcing sharply, cutting the share arriving from West Asia since the Gulf crisis began in late February. S&P Global Energy has also reported that India has tried to build a cushion by sourcing from countries beyond the Strait of Hormuz, while India Briefing says the country now buys crude from around 40 nations.
Yet the physical geography of oil flows still leaves India exposed. According to the Indian Express column, Gulf exporters had to reroute cargoes through Yanbu on the Red Sea coast and use pipeline capacity to Fujairah after the Strait of Hormuz became unusable earlier this year, only for those volumes to depend on Bab el-Mandeb, a second chokepoint that has worsened this month. That means the route may be different, but the vulnerability remains. Even Russian oil, which has filled much of the gap in India’s import mix, is not fully insulated from wider shipping and market disruption.
The deeper lesson is that supply diversification is only one part of energy security. Research from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has argued that India still faces structural weaknesses and needs more storage, better logistics and a longer-term oil security plan, not just a wider list of suppliers. The Observer Research Foundation has reached a similar conclusion, saying India has reduced its dependence on any single route but remains heavily exposed to maritime bottlenecks in West Asia. In practical terms, that means India may have improved its resilience, but it has not escaped the basic risks of being a large import-dependent economy.
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