PM Modi holds meeting, reviews ways to reduce crude imports

New Delhi: With fuel prices rising despite an excise duty cut, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday held a meeting with the finance minister and oil ministry officials.

According to sources, the meeting discussed ways to boost domestic production of crude oil so that dependence on imports could be cut.

Finance minister Arun Jaitley and oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan are said to have been present. Sources said that while Modi’s vision has been to increase domestic oil production by 10 per cent, recently there has been over 3 per cent decline in oil production in the country increasing its imports and widening current account deficit.

The issues arising from US sanctions on Iran and how to deal with it was also discussed during the meeting, said sources.   

The way to find long term fix for oil imports also came up. The possibility of using new technologies to boost oil production from ageing oil fields too was discussed.

ONGC CMD Shashi Shanker and Oil India CMD Utpal Bora are said to have given projections of oil and gas production of their respective companies over the next five-year period.

Mr Modi had in March 2015 called for bringing down India’s import dependence on oil and gas to 67 per cent of its requirement by 2022. He had used 77 per cent oil import dependence in the fiscal year 2013-14 (ending March 31, 2014) as the reference to call for reducing import dependence to 67 per cent by 2022.

Import dependence has, however, increased since then. India’s oil import dependence rose to 81.7 per cent in 2016-17 and further to 82.8 per cent in 2017-18.

During the April-August period of current 2018-19 fiscal, it has gone up further to 83.2 per cent, according to the Oil Ministry's Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell (PPAC).