India's Directorate General of Hydrocarbons publishes an annual volume called India's Hydrocarbon Outlook. Buried at page 77 of the 2024-25 edition is a ten-year table that states the problem more plainly than any commentary: crude oil production has fallen from 36.96 MMT in 2015-16 to 28.70 MMT in 2024-25, which DGH attributes to "depletion of reserves and limited contribution from new discoveries."

Ten years, one direction

Production by operator regime. ONGC and OIL hold "nomination" acreage — blocks allotted by the state before competitive licensing. PSC covers production-sharing contracts, i.e. private and joint-venture operators.

Read the columns separately and the story sharpens. ONGC's nomination fields fell from 22.26 to 18.47 MMT — a loss of 3.8 MMT, or 17%. PSC oil fell from 11.78 to 6.79 MMT — a loss of 5.0 MMT, or 42%. The private blocks declined faster than the state ones. Only OIL's small nomination acreage is roughly flat, at 3.4 MMT.

That matters because the usual framing — tired public-sector fields versus dynamic private operators — does not survive the table. Both are depleting. The difference is that PSC oil started smaller and fell harder.

Gas held up, but not for the reason you would guess

Gas looks like the good news: 32.25 BCM in 2015-16 to 36.11 BCM in 2024-25. But the composition inverted underneath it. ONGC's nomination gas went 21.18 → 18.80 BCM and OIL's barely moved, while PSC gas went 7.84 → 13.38 BCM. DGH credits this to NELP blocks, "particularly the deepwater blocks in Krishna Godavari basin."

So the aggregate held because one new deepwater province came online fast enough to cover a decade of decline everywhere else. The PSC share of gas production specifically rose from 24.3% to 37% over the period. That is a real achievement, and also a concentration risk: the gas number now depends heavily on how a small number of KG-basin wells perform. Oil tells the opposite story on the same metric — PSC's share of oil production fell over the same decade, since PSC oil (11.78→6.79 MMT) declined faster in percentage terms than ONGC's nomination oil did. The two commodities moved in different directions on this measure; neither generalises to "total production."

Where the oil actually is

Basin-wise crude production, FY2024-25:

Mumbai Offshore alone is 43.45% of national crude. Add Assam-Arakan Shelf and Rajasthan and three basins account for 78%. By state — a different geography that does not map 1:1 onto the basin boundaries above — Western Offshore is 44.08% (12.65 MMT), Rajasthan 15.52%, Gujarat 17.89% including onshore Cambay.

This is the concentration that makes the decline hard to arrest. A field that has been on production since the 1970s and still supplies four barrels in ten cannot be replaced by incremental drilling elsewhere; the arithmetic simply does not work at the scale required.

The targets have detached from the fields

Every category missed. Not one operator, not one regime — all of them, by 6–13%. When a target is set 2.6 MMT above what the reservoirs deliver, and the same gap appears in the same direction each year, the target has stopped being a forecast and become an aspiration. Readers evaluating any Indian production projection should check it against the achievement column, not the target column.

The refining paradox

India is a growing refiner and a shrinking producer at the same time. Refineries processed 267.5 MMT of crude in FY2024-25 and produced 284.1 MMT of products, of which 64.7 MMT was exported. Domestic fields supplied 28.70 MMT — about 11% of throughput.

The refining industry is world-scale, expanding and profitable. It simply runs on other people's oil, and 78.5% of what it processes is high-sulphur crude, which narrows the grades India can realistically substitute toward when it wants to change supplier.

What follows from this

• The decline is geological. PIB and DGH both attribute it to natural decline and rising water cut in matured fields. Rising water cut is the signature of a reservoir past plateau — the wells keep flowing, but progressively more of what they lift is water. IOR/EOR slows this; it does not reverse it.
• Gas is the more urgent gap. Oil dependency is already near 90% and moves slowly. Gas is where the divergence is opening fastest, and it lands directly on city gas distribution and on fertiliser feedstock — both sectors this blog has covered, and both now more exposed to LNG price than they were.
• Treat "targets" as claims, not data. 91.8% and 91.0% achievement, with every single category missing, is a systematic pattern rather than a bad year.

Sources: Directorate General of Hydrocarbons, India's Hydrocarbon Outlook 2024-2025 (Annual Report) — section 3.3 and Tables 3.4 and 3.6, and Figures 3.5–3.8 for basin and location splits; published at dghindia.gov.in/annual-publications. PPAC, Snapshot of India's Oil & Gas Data, March 2025 — crude and gas production, import quantity and value, self-sufficiency in petroleum products, refinery throughput and high-sulphur share. PPAC, Flash Report on Oil & Gas, July 2026 — product consumption. PIB and DGH statements attributing the decline to natural decline and rising water cut in matured ONGC and OIL fields. Figures marked provisional at source may be revised; DGH reports oil in TMT/MMT and gas in MMSCM/BCM, and both units are preserved here as published rather than converted.

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.