While energy crises left households across Europe and Asia scrambling for affordable fuel, India kept the lights on and the stoves burning — and Union Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri wants the world to know exactly how. Speaking at #ETM2026 on Tuesday, 27 October 2026, Puri laid out a detailed account of how the Modi government insulated Indian consumers from a global energy shock that sent crude prices spiralling.

80% global surge, 8% Indian bump — the arithmetic of insulation

The central claim is striking. When global crude prices surged by around 80% during the post-pandemic and geopolitical-crisis period, retail petrol and diesel prices in India rose by only about 8%. The gap between those two numbers is not magic — it is policy, and it came at a cost borne partly by the exchequer and partly by India's public-sector oil giants.

Indian Oil Corporation, Bharat Petroleum, and Hindustan Petroleum absorbed a significant portion of the additional crude cost to prevent it from flowing through entirely to pump prices. The government complemented that buffer with three rounds of fuel tax cuts, the most consequential of which came in May 2022 — ₹8 per litre off petrol and ₹6 per litre off diesel — as the Russia-Ukraine conflict pushed global benchmarks to multi-year highs.

Ujjwala's firewall: a ₹1,600 cylinder held at ₹642

For the poorest households, the protection was even more direct. As the import-linked cost of an LPG cylinder crossed ₹1,600, beneficiaries of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana — the flagship clean-cooking scheme launched in May 2016 for below-poverty-line families — paid an effective price of just ₹642. That gap of nearly ₹1,000 per cylinder represents a direct subsidy shield that kept clean cooking fuel within reach for millions of rural and semi-urban women who had only recently received their first LPG connection.

Ujjwala, which began as an access programme, effectively doubled as a price-protection instrument during the shock years — a policy design choice that its architects could not have fully anticipated but which proved consequential when tested.

Building the next line of defence: storage, output, and diversification

Puri's remarks at ETM2026 were not only retrospective. He pointed to ongoing efforts to increase domestic crude production, expand strategic petroleum storage, and diversify India's import sources — a strategy that reduces the country's exposure to any single supplier or geopolitical flashpoint. The diversification push accelerated after 2022, when India notably expanded purchases from alternative suppliers to fill the supply gap created by Western sanctions on Russian exports.

The minister framed these investments as the architecture of future resilience: the same insulation that protected Indian families from the last shock, rebuilt and reinforced before the next one arrives.

When the rest of the world was rationing, India was refuelling. That is the argument Puri is making — and at ETM2026, he is making it with numbers.