When the world was reeling from an unprecedented energy crisis, Union Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri says India chose foresight over panic — and the numbers he cites make the case sharply. In a post on Saturday, 1 August 2026, Puri argued that while nations across the globe scrambled with fuel shortages, rationing, and punishing price spikes, Indian households never faced an LPG crunch and were largely insulated from the worst of the global storm.

Posting in Hindi, the minister wrote: 'जब दुनिया अभूतपूर्व ऊर्जा संकट से जूझ रही थी, तब भारत ने घबराहट नहीं, बल्कि दूरदर्शी नेतृत्व और मजबूत तैयारी का परिचय दिया' — 'When the world was grappling with an unprecedented energy crisis, India demonstrated not panic, but visionary leadership and strong preparedness.' He credited Prime Minister Narendra Modi with repeatedly cutting central excise duty to prevent global crude price shocks from landing directly on ordinary citizens.

The excise cuts that cushioned the blow

The most concrete claim in Puri's post: the Modi government reduced excise duty on petrol and diesel by up to ₹10 per litre. That figure tracks with the documented policy trajectory. In May 2022, as crude prices surged in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the Centre cut excise duty on petrol by ₹8 per litre and on diesel by ₹6 per litre — among the steepest single-step reductions in recent memory. The move was explicitly designed to arrest retail price inflation at the pump without forcing public-sector oil marketing companies to absorb unsustainable losses.

India's practice of deploying excise and customs duty adjustments as a shock absorber is not new — successive governments have reached for the same lever during price spikes. What the Modi administration claims as distinctive is the scale and speed of the response during the 2022 commodity surge, when Brent crude briefly crossed $130 per barrel.

LPG supply: the political and social stakes

Puri's specific mention of LPG is telling. Cooking gas is not just an economic variable in India — it is a welfare metric. The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, which brought LPG connections to over 100 million low-income households, made uninterrupted supply a political and social commitment as much as a logistics one. Any shortage would have hit the most vulnerable beneficiaries hardest. The minister's assertion that 'no LPG shortage was allowed to occur' positions the government's supply management as a direct extension of that welfare promise.

The contrast Puri draws is pointed: European nations rationed energy, some Asian economies saw fuel queues, and several developing countries were forced into painful subsidy cuts under IMF pressure. India, he argues, held the line — not through luck, but through deliberate policy architecture.

Why this argument resurfaces now

With global energy markets still volatile and the next Union Budget cycle approaching, the minister's framing is clearly intended to anchor the government's energy record in public memory. Any revision to central excise rates on fuels — upward or downward — in the coming budget or at a GST Council meeting will be measured against exactly the benchmark Puri is now setting. The government is, in effect, writing its own scorecard.

India navigated the worst global energy crisis in a generation without the rationing or price chaos that scarred other economies. Whether that record holds as crude markets shift again is the question the next budget will have to answer.