Opinion: The number that mattered this week was not the oil price. It was 15.

Every time the Strait of Hormuz makes the front page, the Indian conversation narrows to a single question: what happens at the petrol pump. It is an understandable instinct and a mostly useless one. The number worth paying attention to this week was not a price at all. It was a count — 15.

That is how many countries India now imports liquefied natural gas from, up from six. Crude oil sourcing has widened from 27 countries to 41. Both figures were given to Parliament on Monday, in a written reply, on a day when almost nobody was looking.

Diversification is unglamorous, and it works

There is no ribbon to cut on a sourcing agreement. No foundation stone, no aerial photograph. Yet the shift from six suppliers to 15 does something no amount of rhetoric can: it changes the meaning of a chokepoint. A country buying from six sources treats a closed strait as an emergency. A country buying from 15 treats it as a routing and pricing problem — expensive, irritating, survivable.

This is the least dramatic form of statecraft there is, which is precisely why it tends to be done quietly and noticed late.

The limits are real, and worth stating

None of this changes the fundamental exposure. India still imports more than 85 per cent of the crude it consumes, and diversification spreads risk without reducing volume. When war-risk premiums rise, they rise on every route at once. A wider supplier list is insurance against a single-point failure, not against a market-wide shock.

Nor is the storage cushion as deep as the headline capacity suggests. India’s strategic petroleum reserves hold 5.33 million metric tonnes across facilities in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka — a buffer measured in days rather than months for an economy of this size.

Where the scrutiny belongs

Two further reserve facilities at Chandikhol in Odisha and Padur in Karnataka, adding a combined 6.5 million metric tonnes, were approved in July 2021. Five years is a long gestation for infrastructure whose entire purpose is to exist before the emergency rather than after it.

That is the fair criticism to make, and it is a more useful one than the annual ritual of blaming West Asia for the pump price. The counter-argument deserves a hearing too: strategic reserves are capital-intensive assets that sit idle by design, and governments of every stripe have found them easy to defer.

The lesson of this month is not that India got lucky. It is that the insurance was bought years ago, largely without applause — and that the remaining premium has not yet been paid in full.