It started with airstrikes on February 28. Thirteen days later, India’s domestic LPG cylinders cost ₹913 in Delhi, induction cooktops are sold out from Blinkit to Croma, and the IEA has formally declared the largest oil supply disruption in the history of the global energy market. The line connecting those facts is shorter and more direct than most Indians realise.
This is the story of how a war in the Middle East became a kitchen crisis in India — and why it is not over.
Where India’s LPG Actually Comes From
India is the world’s second largest LPG consumer after China. It imports approximately 55-60% of its LPG requirements — the balance comes from domestic refineries processing crude oil. The imported portion arrives almost entirely from one region: the Middle East. Saudi Aramco’s Saudi CP price is the benchmark against which Indian LPG import contracts are priced. The physical volumes — tankers loaded with liquefied petroleum gas — sail from terminals in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar and Kuwait through a narrow stretch of water called the Strait of Hormuz before crossing the Arabian Sea to ports in Gujarat, Maharashtra and elsewhere on India’s west coast.
The Strait of Hormuz is 33 kilometres wide at its narrowest point. Approximately 1.5 million barrels per day of LPG passed through it in 2025, according to the IEA. That flow has now effectively stopped.
February 28: The Day the Supply Chain Broke
When the United States and Israel launched joint airstrikes on Iran on February 28 under Operation Roaring Lion and Operation Epic Fury — targeting Iranian military infrastructure, leadership and nuclear-related sites — Iran’s response was not limited to missiles aimed at Israel. Tehran activated its most powerful economic weapon: control over the Strait of Hormuz.
Iranian Revolutionary Guards began targeting commercial tankers. Iran declared that no oil would leave the Gulf while attacks on its territory continued. Insurance underwriters — Lloyd’s of London and the broader war risk market — responded by either refusing coverage for Hormuz transit or pricing it at levels that made commercial shipping economically unviable. Ship crews refused assignments. Tanker owners diverted vessels away from the Gulf.
Within days, the Strait went from handling 20 million barrels per day of oil and product flows to a trickle. The LPG tankers that would normally be loading at Ras Tanura, Ruwais and Ras Laffan were not loading. The ones already at sea were being diverted or sitting at anchor waiting for clarity that did not come.
India’s LPG import pipeline — built on the assumption that Gulf supply would flow reliably — had its feedstock cut off at the source.
How the Shortage Reached Indian Kitchens
India’s LPG distribution system, managed primarily through Indian Oil, BPCL and HPCL under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana and broader distribution networks, carries buffer stocks measured in weeks rather than months. The system is designed for distribution efficiency, not crisis resilience.
When import flows from the Gulf stopped in early March, domestic refineries continued producing LPG from crude oil processing — but at volumes that cover less than half of national consumption. The gap between domestic production and total demand, normally filled by imports, began to show up first in commercial LPG availability — the larger cylinders used by restaurants, hotels, street food vendors and industrial users — before spreading to the domestic 14.2 kg cylinders that 300 million Indian households depend on for daily cooking.
Prices responded immediately. Delhi domestic cylinder prices crossed ₹913. Commercial cylinders — already more expensive per unit — saw sharper absolute increases and in many areas faced genuine allocation constraints where distributors simply did not have enough stock to fill all orders.
CLSA, in its March 12 research note, warned that an acute LPG and gas shortage was possible over the next three to four weeks, with alternate supply not arriving before end-April. The IEA’s March report, released the same day, formally identified India as one of the two regions — alongside East Africa — most immediately exposed to LPG supply disruption from the Hormuz closure.
The Induction Cooktop Phenomenon
The consumer response was faster and more dramatic than any government model or retail forecast anticipated. Within days of the commercial shortage becoming visible, households across India began switching to the only readily available alternative: electric induction cooking.
Induction cooktop sales surged 20 to 30 times on Amazon and Flipkart. Amazon India reported approximately a 20-fold jump in 24 hours. Flipkart saw sales quadruple. Physical retailers including Croma and Vijay Sales reported 3 to 4 times normal daily volumes. Quick commerce platforms — Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart — went out of stock across Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Chennai within hours of each restock.
The brands that make these products — Pigeon by Stovekraft, Butterfly Gandhimathi, Prestige, Bajaj, Philips, Havells — saw their stocks surge on NSE and BSE. Stovekraft jumped 9.42% on March 12. Butterfly Gandhimathi gained 8.72% the same morning. The stock market was simply pricing what retail shelves were already showing: India was switching from gas to electric cooking in real time, at a scale and speed that had no precedent.
The Restaurant Economy Caught in the Middle
India has approximately 7.5 million food service establishments. The overwhelming majority run on commercial LPG. When commercial cylinder availability tightened and prices spiked, restaurant owners faced an immediate operational crisis with no easy solution.
Induction cooktops designed for household use cannot replicate the output of commercial gas burners for high-volume professional kitchens. Industrial electric cooking equipment is expensive, requires electrical infrastructure upgrades and takes weeks to procure and install. Kerosene stoves — viable as a short-term backup — carry ventilation and fire safety complications in dense urban restaurant settings.
Many restaurant owners began rationing cooking hours, reducing menus to dishes requiring less gas, or passing costs directly to consumers through price increases. Some smaller establishments in areas with the worst supply constraints reduced operating hours or closed temporarily.
Motilal Oswal flagged the downstream consequence for food delivery platforms — if restaurant kitchens cannot cook at normal capacity, order volumes on Swiggy and Zomato fall regardless of consumer demand. Swiggy fell 2.2% and Eternal — Zomato’s parent — dropped up to 4.5% in Thursday’s session as markets priced in that risk.
The Alternate Supply Problem: Why End-April Is the Earliest Fix
The natural question is why India cannot simply source LPG from elsewhere. The answer is infrastructure, contracts and time.
LPG import terminals on India’s west coast are designed and contractually oriented toward Gulf supply. Sourcing from the United States, Australia, West Africa or Southeast Asia requires different vessel types for longer voyages, different contract structures, different port logistics, and in some cases terminal modifications. None of that happens in days.
The U.S. is a major LPG exporter — American shale gas processing produces large volumes of propane and butane that are exported globally. But U.S. LPG exports primarily leave from Gulf of Mexico terminals and take approximately 25 to 35 days to reach Indian ports under normal routing. Contracting, loading and sailing time means the earliest realistic arrival of meaningfully redirected non-Gulf LPG supply into India is late April — consistent with CLSA’s end-April estimate.
Between now and then, India is managing on domestic refinery output, existing pipeline inventory, and whatever residual Gulf supply managed to load and depart before the Hormuz closure tightened completely.
The Longer Consequence: A Forced Energy Transition
There is an argument — uncomfortable to make in the middle of a supply crisis but worth making — that what is happening to India’s LPG market in March 2026 is a compressed, chaotic version of an energy transition that was always going to happen eventually.
India has been subsidising LPG for decades, building a cooking fuel dependency on an imported commodity priced in dollars and sourced from a geopolitically volatile region. The vulnerability this creates was never a secret — it was a known risk that was politically easier to manage through subsidy than to address through genuine diversification toward electric cooking, biogas and solar alternatives.
The crisis has forced millions of Indian households to discover, in a matter of days, that induction cooking works. That electric pressure cookers handle dal and rice without drama. That the transition to non-LPG cooking, while requiring new equipment, is not technically difficult once the psychological barrier is broken.
Every household that buys an induction cooktop this week and gets comfortable with it is a household that will not return entirely to LPG dependence even when Gulf supply normalises. Every restaurant that installs electric cooking infrastructure to survive the shortage has made a capital investment it will not immediately abandon. The crisis is functioning as a forced adoption event for cooking electrification — compressing what might have been a decade of gradual market transition into weeks.
Whether Indian policymakers use that opening to structurally accelerate the shift away from imported LPG dependency — through targeted subsidies for electric cooking equipment, grid upgrades in rural areas, and biogas infrastructure investment — will determine whether March 2026 becomes a turning point or just an expensive episode that fades once Gulf supply resumes.
The war that caused it began 3,000 kilometres away. Its most lasting consequence for India may be on the kitchen counter.