New Delhi: Indian Oil Chairman Arvinder Singh Sahney said on Friday that “India’s energy future lies in producing more and depending less on imports.” In a post on X, he pointed to the contract awards under the Discovered Small Field (DSF) Bid Round IV and the Samudra Manthan Mission. Together, he said, they marked “significant steps towards unlocking India’s hydrocarbon potential, attracting private investment and strengthening domestic production.”
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Sahney called the two measures “a decisive push towards energy security and the vision of Viksit Bharat,” and credited them to the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
His post came a day after Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Hardeep Singh Puri attended the DSF-IV contract awards and the release of the operational guidelines for Samudra Manthan on Thursday. Puri made the same case on X. India is set to drive about 30 percent of global incremental energy demand over the next two decades, he said, yet 88 percent of its crude oil and about 50 percent of its natural gas are still imported. The way forward, in his words, was to “produce more and depend less.”
Puri tied this to a run of policy changes. He cited a new Oilfields (Regulation and Development) Act, new Petroleum and Natural Gas Rules, a new framework contract and the Samudra Manthan Mission. With these, he said, India’s exploration and production (E&P) sector “is gaining momentum.”
Active exploration now covers 12 percent of the country’s sedimentary basin area, according to Puri. He said this is expected to rise to 19 percent once blocks under rounds X and XI of the Open Acreage Licensing Policy (OALP) are awarded. Of the area under active exploration, 81 percent was awarded after 2014, he said. The ministry’s target is 1 million sq km of exploration acreage by 2030.
The DSF-IV round was launched on April 15, 2025. It offered 55 discoveries grouped into nine contract areas across five sedimentary basins, covering 6,133.02 sq km, Puri said. The three onland areas covered 1,120.91 sq km and the six offshore areas 5,012.11 sq km. Puri put the in-place volume of the 55 discoveries at an estimated 260 million tonnes of oil equivalent (MMTOE).
Nine new private sector players took part in the round. This, Puri said, showed that “reform is meaningful when it improves the terms on which companies can invest, take technical decisions and bring fields into production.”
One of the contract areas went to Oilmax Energy, the holding company of Asian Energy Services. Oilmax signed a revenue sharing contract (RSC) with the government on Thursday for contract area GK/OSDSF/GKOSN/2025, according to Asian Energy Services. The Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH) had awarded it the area on August 31. Asian Energy Services said Oilmax holds a 50 percent participating interest and is the operator.
Puri presented the two initiatives as parts of a single plan. “DSF-IV and Samudra Manthan are two halves of one strategy to develop what we have discovered; explore what remains beyond our reach,” he said. Under Samudra Manthan, he added, the government would unlock offshore resources through new seismic surveys, shared drilling costs for around 60 deepwater and ultra-deepwater wells, and common offshore infrastructure.
Prime Minister Modi first announced a National Deep Water Exploration Mission in his Independence Day address in 2025, and named it Samudra Manthan. The Union Cabinet approved it on July 31 as the National Offshore Exploration Scheme, with an outlay of Rs 84,084 crore up to FY2030-31.
The government expects the scheme to add over 600 MMTOE of reserves, subject to exploration success. That would take the resource base from 1.6 billion tonnes of oil equivalent to 2.2 billion. The government said the aim was to raise annual domestic production from about 62 MMTOE to 80 MMTOE.
India’s annual crude import bill was at nearly USD 144 billion, or about Rs 13 lakh crore. “Recent global events have shown how vital uninterrupted energy access is,” a statement issued by the government said. It added that additional output from the scheme could cut crude imports by nearly Rs 1 lakh crore a year.
The war involving the US, Israel and Iran, which began on February 28, effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz. Threats to shipping through the Bab-el-Mandeb strait added to the disruption to West Asian supplies.
The cost has shown up in the import bill. India’s crude import bill rose 47 percent to USD 15.4 billion in September, according to data from the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell (PPAC). Import volumes rose only about 7 percent, to 21.7 million tonnes from 20.3 million tonnes a year earlier. The Indian basket, PPAC’s benchmark built from Oman/Dubai and Brent prices, averaged USD 116.09 a barrel in September against USD 69.61 a year earlier. For April to September, the crude import bill rose 46.4 percent to USD 90.6 billion.
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Physical supplies from the region have since recovered. Imports of West Asian crude rose to about 2.8 million barrels per day in September, back to pre-war levels. The region accounted for about 54 percent of India’s crude purchases that month.
