India’s vulnerability was quick to show. Within two weeks of the US and Israel attacking Iran on February 28, Indians were queuing for cooking gas.A woman, probably in her mid-forties, came close to breaking down in front of a reporter. “We have not cooked at home for 5-6 days now,” she said. “We have been running around for a week looking for gas. Cylinders are now selling for Rs 7,000. How are we supposed to feed our children? Hum duty karein ya gas ki line mein lagey (Should we work or stand in queues for LPG)?”She wasn’t the only one ambushed by the energy shortage. In the initial weeks of the war, as eateries slashed menus, switched to coal or firewood, or even contemplated closure, their suppliers, food delivery agents and employees wondered what lay in store. Farmers wondered if they would get enough urea. Industrial units running on LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) or CNG (compressed natural gas) – or those using industrial inputs made from petroleum – worried about shortages as well.By the end of the first month itself, some of these fears had metastasised into reality. Units in industrial clusters like Gujarat’s Morbi began closing. In Surat, five years after COVID-19, migrant workers queued once more outside train stations. “We have not eaten for the last four days,” one textile worker said. Across India, prices of coal and firewood began climbing, taking the country into higher pollution and accelerated tree loss, even deforestation.The worst, however, was yet to come. The crises listed above had resulted from delayed oil shipments from the Gulf. Three months into the war, as the last of the pre-loaded cargoes reached India, the larger costs of slashed oil/gas production – as much as 40% of the refining capacity in the Gulf had been damaged – began to make themselves felt. Poorer families were spending as much as a third of their earnings on LPG or falling back on firewood. Between scarcer inputs like petroleum-based industrial feedstock and a mounting struggle to get diesel for trucks, industrial production dropped. Job losses rose.Along the way, the costs of energy dependence came home to roost in India. Today, as the world hopes the peace deal will last and India starts to reckon with the economic, ecological and social costs it has incurred, a question needs to be asked: How did we get here? The answer doesn’t just lie in the US-Israel attack on Iran. There is also the role of the Modi government. It took a set of decisions which left India more dependent on imported fuels than before.We need to take a deep-dive into these decisions.§“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.A spate of puzzling choicesTake natural gas. Despite India’s low domestic reserves of the hydrocarbon and the high price of imported gas, the NDA decided to treble India’s natural gas consumption. With that, India, already importing petroleum, got hooked to gas as well. Or take renewables. In 2020, chasing self-reliance in photovoltaics and batteries, the NDA rolled out the PLI (Production-Linked Incentive) scheme. While choosing beneficiaries, however, it ignored firms already developing renewable technologies and directed PLI support to Adani, Ambani and firms like Rajesh Exports which promised unrealistically high localisation – and thereafter failed to deliver. With that, India’s reliance on renewable imports has stayed unchanged.There are yet other instances. As the second part of this series will show, the NDA projected large spikes in India’s demand for oil, resulting in global fossil fuel majors coming to see India as their last big market. In nuclear, it ditched indigenous thorium to tie up with a US firm for supplies of nuclear fuel. Similarly, even though India’s atomic energy scientists have been warning against Small and Modular Reactors (SMRs), the NDA is tying up with foreign firms developing SMRs instead of backing the Bharat Small Modular Reactors, being developed by NPCIL and BARC. If such decisions deepened the country’s import dependence, another set accentuated its vulnerability to external shocks. Under pressure from the US, the NDA stopped buying oil from Iran – and then from Russia. It also neglected to fill its strategic reserve for crude oil. One could go on. How does one understand such decisions?How to test policyAs with any country, India’s energy sector is notoriously complicated.Not only does the country run on diverse forms of energy, it also has multiple ministries and departments at the Union and the states working as overseers. In addition, it has state- and privately-owned firms producing and distributing energy plus supply chains for inputs and technology that extend into other countries. And so, India’s energy choices are shaped by multiple factors: geopolitics, local and global energy firms, the economics of energy, raw materials’ exploration, extraction and production, national imperatives, national constraints, consumer behaviour, etc. Given this matrix, anyone seeking to understand decisions like the ones listed above has to ask three questions. Did the NDA make the right decision? Was it impelled by forces outside its control? Or was this mess – which had poorer households paying through their nose for LPG, factories closing, and workers returning home – avoidable?Over the next three reports, The Wire will try to answer these questions.M. Rajshekhar is an independent reporter who writes on energy, climate change and oligarchy. He is also the author of Despite The State: Why India Lets Its People Down and How They Cope.