In late February, a 14.2-kilo cooking gas cylinder that normally goes for around Rs900 was changing hands on the grey market in Indian cities for Rs1,800 to Rs2,500. Restaurants in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kochi shut their kitchens or fell back on firewood and coal. Home deliveries that used to take one to three days stretched to two weeks. The trigger wasn’t a refinery fire or a domestic strike. It was a narrow shipping lane 3,000 kilometres away, and India had been watching the wrong end of the barrel.
Everyone tracks the petrol pump when the Middle East catches fire. That’s the reflex, and this time it was the wrong one. India has quietly rerouted about 70 percent of its crude oil imports away from the Strait of Hormuz, according to Outlook India, up from roughly 55 percent a year or two ago. Crude now arrives from something like 40 countries, a lot of it Russian barrels coming in over routes that never touch the Gulf. On oil, in other words, India spent the last few years building itself an exit.
Cooking gas got no such exit. India imports close to 60 percent of the LPG its households burn, and about 90 percent of that shipped-in gas still comes through Hormuz. That supply, the reporting notes plainly, is far more exposed than petrol or diesel to a prolonged disruption. The reason is geographic and stubborn: the imported gas comes overwhelmingly from four Gulf neighbours, the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and almost every tonne of it sails out through the same twenty-mile chokepoint. You can diversify crude across oceans. You cannot diversify your way out of who your gas neighbours are.
When the strait effectively closed earlier this year, the machinery of rationing came out fast. The government slashed commercial LPG allocations by 80 percent, then clawed a fraction back. It stretched the minimum gap between household bookings to 25 days in cities and 45 in rural areas. Enforcement teams ran more than 12,000 raids under the Essential Commodities Act and seized over 15,000 cylinders from hoarders. The National reported black-market cylinders at nearly three times their normal price while ordinary families waited a week or two for a refill that used to show up the next morning.
The workarounds tell you how deep it cut. Induction cooktop sales jumped roughly 30-fold on Amazon and quadrupled on Flipkart; one Chennai retailer clocked a 300 percent spike in cooktops and electric kettles. A country that runs on gas flames spent a few weeks rediscovering the electric coil — not as a lifestyle upgrade, but because the cylinder under the counter had gone quiet.
Here’s why this lands differently than a fuel-price headline, and why it travels. LPG in India isn’t just a commodity, it’s a political promise. Under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, launched in 2016 to put deposit-free connections into poor women’s kitchens, there are now about 10.33 crore connections on the books. Beneficiaries pay roughly Rs600-odd for a cylinder that a general Delhi customer buys for around Rs942, with the state absorbing the rest through a Rs300 targeted subsidy budgeted in the thousands of crores. Indians pay among the lowest cooking-gas prices in the world, and that low price is load-bearing — it holds up rural budgets, it turns up in every election cycle. A Hormuz shock doesn’t just raise a number on a receipt. It leans on a subsidy the government has staked real political capital on keeping cheap.
That’s the part the diaspora feels in the gut. If you’re reading this from Toronto or Dubai or East London, the strait is an abstraction, but the cylinder isn’t — it’s the one your parents’ cook lights every morning, the one an aunt in a small town books 25 days in advance and now can’t. Geopolitics usually reaches a family living abroad as a vibe, a worried WhatsApp forward. This reaches them as a specific object in a specific kitchen, going cold.
And it isn’t over. On July 9, fresh US strikes on Iranian targets sent Brent crude back toward $79 a barrel, and shipping through Hormuz had already thinned out over the year as insurers priced in the risk of hitting a commercial vessel. Every one of those tankers idling outside the strait is carrying somebody’s refill. India can keep buying its oil around the long way. Its kitchens don’t have that option yet.
So the number worth watching this summer isn’t at the petrol pump, where India has already bought itself room to breathe. It’s the delivery date on a gas booking in a Tier-2 town, and the quiet arithmetic in a finance ministry deciding how long it can keep 10 crore cylinders cheap while the tankers wait their turn through a strait that kitchen will never see.
Sources
- Outlook India — Strait of Hormuz explained: why fresh US-Iran tensions matter for India’s economy (2026)
- The National — How the Iran war brought India’s kitchens into the line of fire (23 March 2026)
- PMIndia — Cabinet approves continuation of targeted subsidy for Ujjwala consumers, Rs 12,000 crore
- PIB — Indian households continue to pay among the lowest cooking gas prices in the world
SEO
- SEO title: India’s Real Hormuz Risk Isn’t Petrol, It’s Cooking Gas
- Meta description: India rerouted 70% of its crude around the Strait of Hormuz — but 90% of imported cooking gas still sails through it. The real LPG vulnerability, explained.
- Focus keyword: India cooking gas Strait of Hormuz
- Secondary keywords: India LPG import dependence, Ujjwala LPG crisis 2026, Strait of Hormuz India
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- Category: Culture & Diaspora
- Tags: LPG crisis, Strait of Hormuz, Ujjwala Yojana, South Asian diaspora, India energy security, cooking gas subsidy
