When missiles fill the skies over West Asia, the tremors reach every household electricity and petrol bill. The ongoing crisis in the region has exposed the vulnerability of India, which is the world's third-largest consumer of crude oil and imports nearly 89 per cent of its requirement, i.e., roughly 1.75 billion barrels a year, or about 4.8 million barrels every single day. Over 60 per cent of that flows through the geopolitically sensitive Strait of Hormuz.

In 2024-25, India's crude oil import bill was $137 billion. If prices stay at the March average of $113.57, then the import bill would balloon to nearly $200 billion. Every ten-dollar rise in the price of a barrel of crude adds $14 to $16 billion to India's import bill. That is money drained from our precious foreign exchange reserves.

That refined oil goes into trucks that move goods, tractors that farm fields, and fishing boats that feed coastal communities. It also powers diesel generators that keep telecom towers humming across rural India.

Solar opportunity for India

There is a way to reduce this vulnerability. We are a nation bathed in light!

India is gifted by geography, which gives it a blazing sun for more than 300 days a year. Unfortunately, sometimes summer heat can also be a curse. We just witnessed a scorching April week. Nineteen of the twenty hottest places on earth were in India, and 92 of the 100 hottest cities globally. But what is a climate burden is simultaneously an energy opportunity of historic proportions.

India leads the International Solar Alliance, a coalition of over 120 sunshine-rich nations. In 2025, India added 38 gigawatts of new solar capacity, surpassing........

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