“The bedrock of a Viksit Bharat is also a self-reliant Bharat. It is a great misfortune when dependency becomes a habit and when we do not even realise and abandon self-reliance and become dependent on others.”
That was Narendra Modi speaking from the Red Fort last year. In the speech, he alluded to India’s energy sector. “We remain dependent on many countries to meet our energy needs. But to build a truly self-reliant India, we must achieve energy independence,” he said.
Modi’s words, however, were belied by his government’s actions.
Since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance came to power, India’s energy dependence on other countries has deepened. In 2012, two years before Modi came to power, India imported about 11% of its annual coal requirement; about 71% of its oil; and about 22% of natural gas.
Fast-forward to today and import dependency in all three fuels has risen.
In 2025, imports met 18.86% of India’s total coal requirement. Similarly, as Union petroleum minister (and swapper of emails with Jeffrey Epstein) Hardeep Singh Puri said last year, India met about 88% of its crude oil and 51% of its gas needs through imports in 2025.
These jumps need a closer look.
The Modi government came to power at a time when the Renewable Energy (RE) revolution – a transition as sweeping as humanity’s previous shift from coal to oil – was gathering pace. By catching the transition early, India could have not only reduced energy dependence but also flipped from an energy importer to an exporter of both renewable energy and renewable technology. As Modi himself said in 2021: “We have to make India a global hub for green hydrogen production and export.”
Over the last 12 years, however, India’s import dependence has risen within renewables as well.
If anything, the country’s dependence is now starker here than in fossil fuels. While India can buy oil and gas from multiple countries, its renewables push hinges on supplies of critical minerals, technologies and equipment (like solar cells and batteries) from one country (China) with whom our relations are testy at best. “In solar, whether we make or buy, our dependence on China will stay,” said a retired official at Solar Energy Corporation of India. “They are our biggest enemy but also our biggest trading partner.”
The usual explanations for this rising reliance on imports – like India’s inadequate domestic reserves of oil and gas; the country’s rising appetite for energy as its economy grows; China’s technological lead and cost-competitiveness in renewables – are not the whole answer. A clutch of decisions taken by the NDA over the last 12 years have played a role too.
And so, cough, The Wire and I have kicked off a four-part series on how mathematician Modi and his band of merry men have hammered India’s energy sector. While talking of atmanirbharta, they have put more money into imported fossil fuels than renewables; devised policies which saw solar panels and tariffs rise in India while falling globally; handing, as with PLI, dubious firms the task of making India catch up with China in renewables technology; one could go on. The cumulative costs of such decisions is what I try to get into.
Part One here is the curtain-raiser. Do read.
Fractured/Earth 
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