Connecting 300 million households to LPG was a political triumph. It also made every one of them dependent on a single waterway 4,000 km away.
On Friday, Sujata Sharma, joint secretary at the petroleum ministry, told reporters that Indian Oil, BPCL and HPCL have been directed to build LPG storage capacity for at least 30 days of demand. The mandate is the policy. The infrastructure is the problem.
A Buffer Built After the Fire
The Hormuz blockade is now a month past its anniversary, but the numbers it exposed haven’t moved much. India holds roughly 45 days of LPG as rolling stock — meaning cylinders already in the pipeline, not strategic reserves sitting in tanks. At the height of the March crisis, before emergency powers kicked in and refiners cranked output 30% higher, that cover had thinned to around 12 days.
Twelve days of cooking gas for 300 million households. That’s the number the 30-day mandate is implicitly admitting.
The Tanks That Don’t Exist
Sharma was careful with her language: the proposal is “still at an early stage.” No timeline. No allocation. No clarity on who pays.
Pressurised LPG storage isn’t crude oil. It needs specialised infrastructure that takes years to permit and build. India built its 74-day Strategic Petroleum Reserve over a decade — for crude. It never built the equivalent for cooking gas, even as the Ujjwala scheme made LPG the default fuel for half the country. The OMCs, already bleeding from selling fuel below market rates, are being asked to fund it.
The Same Day, the Other Hand
Hours after the directive, Trump announced he’d lift the US blockade of Iranian shipping. The Hormuz reopening clock has started ticking.
India is building for the next crisis while the current one quietly winds down. That’s not contradiction. That’s the lesson.