Society
Sonam Wangchuk: Educator, Engineer, and a Legal Fight Still Unfolding
Educator, engineer, hunger striker, NSA detainee — is Sonam Wangchuk a rebel, a hero, or both? A data-checked profile of the man and the unresolved fight around him.
Sonam Wangchuk turned a 5% pass rate into 75%, engineered an artificial glacier that needs no electricity, and seeded a university with his own prize money. He has also spent six months in jail under India’s National Security Act, and this July was hospitalized after a three-week hunger strike in Delhi. This profile separates the engineering record from the ongoing legal and political fight — and reports both without resolving either.
Sonam Wangchuk has spent nearly four decades building things designed to work without him: a school where students, not staff, set the rules; an artificial glacier that needs no electricity or pump; a university seeded with his own prize money rather than a donor’s. He has also, over the past two years, been jailed under one of India’s most restrictive security laws, had his organisation’s foreign-funding licence revoked by the federal government, watched a protest he was supporting while on hunger strike descend into violence in which four people were killed. Both of these are true, and both are part of the record.
This piece separates the two. It sets out, with as much precision as the public record allows, what Sonam Wangchuk actually built and measured in education and engineering — and then reports, without taking a side, on the legal and political conflict that has consumed much of the last eighteen months of his public life.
The education crisis that inspired Sonam Wangchuk. The diagnosis: 1988
Sonam Wangchuk was born in 1966 in a village near Alchi, in what was then Jammu and Kashmir’s Ladakh region. He trained as a mechanical engineer at what is now the National Institute of Technology, Srinagar. In 1988, together with his brother and five friends, he founded the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL).
The problem they set out to address was specific: at the time, close to 95% of Ladakhi students were failing their Class 10 board examinations. Wangchuk’s explanation, restated in interviews for decades since, was that the curriculum was the wrong one for the place — children who spoke Ladakhi or Tibetan at home were taught in Urdu and English, memorising material with no relevance to a high-altitude cold desert.
SECMOL’s campus near Leh took students who had already failed their board exams — failure was the admission criterion, not marks. The school ran on student self-governance: pupils cooked, budgeted, and voted on rules. Wangchuk designed the buildings himself: passive-solar structures of rammed earth that held an interior temperature of roughly 15°C even when it was minus 15°C outside, without any purchased heating.
| The two sides |
|---|
| Regional Class 10 pass rates in Ladakh rose from roughly 5% to 75% over two decades under Operation New Hope, a multi-agency effort in which Wangchuk’s SECMOL school was one contributor, not the sole architect. |
| His Ice Stupa design stores meltwater as a cone of ice using no electricity, pumps, or moving parts — but a 2019 academic study found the technique requires heavy labor and maintenance and can only store limited volumes relative to the effort involved. |
| In September 2025, a hunger strike Sonam Wangchuck led preceded a riot that killed four people; he was detained without trial under India’s National Security Act for nearly six months, while his organization’s foreign-funding license was revoked and a university land lease was cancelled. |
| The government maintains his rhetoric contributed to the violence; he and his wife maintain the detention was retaliation for his activism — a dispute that reached the Supreme Court and remains legally unresolved even after his release in March 2026. |
| www.edpublica.com |
Regional pass rates climbed from around 5% to close to 75% over the following two decades, according to figures compiled by SECMOL and the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives. That reversal is not attributable to SECMOL alone. It happened under Operation New Hope, a joint effort involving the state government, the local school system, and several NGOs, of which SECMOL was one. What is specifically attributable to Wangchuk is the diagnosis that anchored the wider reform, and the SECMOL campus itself, which functioned as both training ground and proof of concept for it.
The Ice Stupa: What the Record Shows, and What Critics Say
Ladakh’s farmers face a seasonal mismatch: glacial meltwater arrives in June, sowing season starts in April. In January and February 2014, Sonam Wangchuk and a group of SECMOL students built a test structure in Leh — a roughly six-metre cone holding about 150,000 litres, built with no shade, no machinery, just gravity-fed piping and freezing night air. Piled water froze into a cone rather than spreading flat, the way earlier artificial glaciers had; a cone’s smaller surface-area-to-volume ratio means it loses less ice to direct sun. The structure held until 18 May, weeks into a season with daytime temperatures above 20°C.
That result persuaded Drikung Kyabgon Chetsang Rinpoche, a senior Buddhist leader who visited and blessed the prototype, to offer land at Phyang village for a full-scale version. Built the following winter, it was roughly 20 metres tall and stored an estimated two million litres — more than ten times the first prototype. Figures compiled by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water put the count at 52 functioning ice stupas in Ladakh a few years after 2019, with additional pilot structures elsewhere, including a confirmed installation in Switzerland’s Val Roseg valley (2016) built with Wangchuk’s direct involvement, and an independently developed project in Chile’s Andes that has cited the Ladakh design as its starting point.
Independent researchers have raised real limitations. A 2019 study by the geographer Marcus Nüsser and colleagues, cited by the climate-adaptation research group climateinterventions.org, found that ice stupas require substantial ongoing maintenance, investment, and construction labour, can only store limited volumes of water relative to the effort involved, and — because they divert water that would otherwise flow into rivers — can carry knock-on effects for communities and ecosystems downstream. None of this contradicts the basic engineering result Wangchuk demonstrated; it does complicate the more sweeping claims sometimes made on his behalf about the technique as a scalable, general-purpose fix for Himalayan water scarcity.
HIAL, and the funding fight that followed
Sonam Wangchuk’s plans for a university predate his exit from SECMOL’s day-to-day leadership. By the time he collected the 2016 Rolex Award for Enterprise — 100,000 Swiss francs, then worth roughly ₹67–68 lakh (about US$104,000) — reporting from the ceremony described him as already “busy establishing” the new institution, with the Leh Autonomous Hill Development Council and the Drikung Kagyu Cultural Welfare Society allocating land for it. He put the entire prize toward it as seed funding. The Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL) was formally founded with his wife and collaborator, Gitanjali J. Angmo, in 2017; Wangchuk stepped back from SECMOL’s leadership only in 2018, by which point HIAL was already underway. According to Angmo, more than 400 students had passed through the institute by 2025.
That funding relationship became contested in 2025. In August, the Ladakh administration cancelled a 40-year land lease it had granted HIAL in 2018, citing non-execution of a formal lease deed and lack of progress on construction. The Wire, examining official correspondence, reported that the delay in executing the deed stemmed from the administration’s own unfinished “New Lease Policy,” despite repeated requests from HIAL to formalise the agreement — an account the Ladakh administration disputes; officials have said HIAL violated the terms of the original allotment. Angmo has separately alleged that a federal minister told her the lease would stay frozen unless Wangchuk abandoned his campaign for Ladakh’s inclusion in the Constitution’s Sixth Schedule. That allegation could not be independently verified for this piece, and no official response to it appears in the public record reviewed here.
In September 2025, the federal Ministry of Home Affairs cancelled SECMOL’s licence to receive foreign donations under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, citing irregularities in its 2021–22 accounts — chiefly a cash deposit of ₹3.5 lakh that SECMOL said was the sale proceeds of an old bus bought years earlier with foreign funds, an explanation the ministry called insufficient. The Central Bureau of Investigation opened a parallel inquiry into HIAL’s foreign funding and into a trip Wangchuk made to Pakistan in February 2025. As of this writing, that inquiry’s outcome has not been made public.
The political fight: statehood, a hunger strike, and a riot
Since Ladakh’s 2019 reorganisation into a Union Territory without a local legislature, Sonam Wangchuk has campaigned for full statehood and for extending the Constitution’s Sixth Schedule protections to the region — protections that would give local bodies greater authority over land and resources. He announced a five-day fast in January 2023, led a 21-day fast in March 2024, and fasted again that October, each time pressing the same demand.
In September 2025, Wangchuk began a hunger strike in Leh in support of the same cause. On 24 September, after 14 days of fasting, protesters at the site moved away and clashes broke out elsewhere in the city; buildings and police vehicles were burned, and police opened fire. Four people were killed and, depending on the account, between 70 and 100 were injured — the worst unrest Ladakh had seen in years. Wangchuk ended his fast and publicly condemned the violence.
The federal government’s position, stated by the Ministry of Home Affairs, was that Wangchuk’s speeches — which it said had invoked the Arab Spring and the 2025 Gen Z protests in Nepal — had “guided” the crowd toward violence. Two days after the deaths, he was arrested and detained under the National Security Act, a law that permits preventive detention for up to twelve months without formal trial. He was held in Jodhpur Central Jail, more than 1,000 kilometres from Ladakh.
Sonam Wangchuk denied inciting the violence. In a letter released from jail, he called it “the saddest day of his life” and asked for an independent judicial inquiry into the four deaths, adding that he was prepared to remain in custody until one was held. His wife challenged the detention before the Supreme Court, arguing it relied on stale or unrelated police complaints — by her account, three of the five FIRs cited predated the September violence entirely, and three did not name Wangchuk at all.
The Court agreed to hear the case; a bench questioned why Angmo had not been given the grounds for the detention, as required by precedent. Before the matter was fully resolved in court, the federal government revoked the detention on 14 March 2026, “after due consideration,” and Wangchuk was released after nearly six months. It is not publicly clear whether any underlying charges against him were dropped.
Three months after his release, in June 2026, Wangchuk began a new hunger strike in New Delhi — this time in support of a youth-led protest group calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party, demanding the resignation of India’s federal education minister over a series of examination paper leaks. He fasted for roughly three weeks before being taken to hospital by Delhi Police; opposition politicians had publicly urged him to stop, citing his health.
This account has tried to state the competing claims plainly rather than adjudicate them: the government’s position that Wangchuk’s rhetoric contributed to fatal violence, and Wangchuk’s and his wife’s position that the detention was a pretext to end his activism, are both matters of ongoing legal dispute, not settled fact. Readers wanting the fullest, most current picture of that dispute are better served by ongoing news coverage than by a profile written for an education and science audience.
The “3 Idiots” connection
In 2009, the Bollywood film 3 Idiots featured Phunsukh Wangdu, an inventor who rejects rote learning. Wangchuk has said the character was inspired by, rather than based directly on, his work, and has generally kept some distance from the comparison. It nonetheless made him recognisable to a much wider Indian public than his engineering or education record alone would have.
The awards record
By 2025, Wangchuk had received close to 15 national and international honours, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award (2018) — often described as Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize — the Rolex Award for Enterprise (2016), the Fred M. Packard Award (2016) for protected-area leadership, the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture (2017), an Ashoka Fellowship (2002), the Real Heroes Award (2008), and recognition as “Eminent Technologist of the Himalayan Region” from IIT Mandi (2018). He has also appeared as a panellist at Nobel Week Dialogue in Stockholm.
Two records, not one
Wangchuk’s engineering and education work has a clear, checkable structure: a defined problem, a low-cost intervention, and a mechanism — student self-governance at SECMOL, a maintenance-free physical design in the Ice Stupa — meant to let the fix outlast its inventor’s direct involvement. Independent researchers have found real limits to how far that model scales, particularly with the Ice Stupa, but the underlying results — the pass-rate shift, the functioning prototypes — are documented by more than his own organisations.
His political record over the past two years is a live, contested legal matter involving a federal law, a state government, a Supreme Court petition, and four deaths whose full circumstances have not been publicly settled. Presenting that record honestly means reporting the claims of both the state and the activist without resolving them — which is what this piece has tried to do, rather than folding one story into the other.
Society
India Is Digitising Fertilizer Use. But Will It Help Farmers Use It Better?
India’s fertilizer management system now links fertilizer purchases with farmer, land and crop data, allowing authorities to track consumption, monitor supply chains and assess fertilizer requirements at the farm level.
For a farmer, fertilizer is not just another item in the supply chain. It can determine how much a crop grows, how much it costs to cultivate and, ultimately, how much a family earns from a harvest. For the government, however, it is also a massive logistical and financial exercise. Millions of tonnes have to reach farmers on time, while subsidies worth thousands of crores have to be tracked.
India is now trying to bring these two sides closer through data. The Integrated Fertilizer Management System (iFMS), the government’s digital platform for managing its production, imports, stocks, sales and subsidies, is being expanded to connect fertilizer purchases with information about farmers, land and crops. It already covers more than 14 crore Aadhaar-linked buyers, over 2.5 lakh retailers and around 7 crore fertilizer transactions every year.
If the government knows what farmers are buying, where they farm and what they are growing, it could get a clearer picture of how much fertilizer is actually needed. But, can better data change the way it is used, or will it simply make the existing system easier to monitor?
Tracking and Understanding its Use
Until now, much of iFMS has focused on following fertilizer through the system—from production and imports to retailers and sales. That is changing. New analytical tools can examine it’s purchases by crop, district, landholding and the type. The government says this can help identify unusual consumption patterns and emerging supply problems. The new Framework for Fertilizer Sale goes a step further. A farmer can book fertilizer using an AgriStack-linked identity after their land and ownership details are verified. A QR-based booking is then generated and matched with the eventual purchase at the retailer. The system can compare what the farmer said they needed with what they actually bought.
In theory, this gives policymakers a much clearer picture. Instead of simply knowing that a certain amount of fertilizer was sold in a district, they could begin asking: Which crops are using it? How much is being applied per hectare? And does the amount purchased make sense for the recorded farm and crop?
That could help with planning supplies and identifying unusual patterns. The government is also using vehicle-location tracking to follow its consignments while they are being transported. This is intended to make it easier to identify delays and unusual movement. For a country managing a huge fertilizer subsidy bill, that visibility matters. But fertilizer shortages and supply-chain leakages are only part of India’s fertilizer problem.
The Problem is Also What Farmers are Encouraged to Use
India has struggled for years with an imbalance in fertilizer use. One reason is price. Urea is sold at a controlled price, while several other fertilizers are covered under the Nutrient Based Subsidy system. This has contributed to a strong preference for nitrogenous fertilizer, particularly urea. PRS has highlighted the resulting imbalance as a concern for agricultural sustainability. But farmers do not make fertilizer decisions based on national nutrient ratios alone.
Their choices are influenced by crop, soil, price, availability, weather and advice from agricultural extension systems. This is why simply collecting more purchase data will not necessarily change fertilizer use. The real value of the system would come if that information could help connect what farmers are buying with what their crops and soils actually need.
ICAR has continued to emphasise balanced nutrient management and soil-test-based fertilizer recommendations as important for maintaining soil health and improving fertilizer efficiency.
What Happens When the Data is Wrong?
There is another issue that could determine whether the system works at the farm level: the quality of the data itself. The government acknowledges that its earlier efforts to connect fertilizer transactions with farmer, land and crop records exposed problems with the availability, completeness and quality of that information.
That matters because a digital record is only useful if it accurately describes the farm. A farmer may change crops. Land records may not reflect current cultivation. Agricultural land can be divided, leased or cultivated under arrangements that are not always captured neatly in administrative databases. If the information is outdated, the system may arrive at an “assessed requirement” that does not match what the farmer actually needs.
And that term—assessed requirement—is becoming important under the new framework. The system is designed to compare fertilizer requirements indicated during booking with actual purchases.
It Cannot Replace Agricultural Knowledge.
India already has several pieces of the puzzle. Soil testing can provide information about nutrient requirements. Crop data can show what is being cultivated. The purchase data can show what farmers are actually using. Logistics data can show where supplies are moving. Bringing these datasets together could help governments identify where fertilizer use is persistently high, where certain nutrients are underused and where farmers may need better agricultural advice.
But the system should not assume that more data automatically means better decisions. Indian agriculture varies enormously across regions. A fertilizer practice that makes sense for one crop or soil may not make sense for another. The government’s own experience with land and crop data shows why this matters. The challenge, therefore, is not simply building a larger database. It is making sure that the database reflects what is happening on the ground.
The Bigger Shift
The latest changes to iFMS point to a larger transformation in agricultural governance. The system is increasingly connecting production, imports, logistics, stocks, farmer and land information, fertilizer bookings, retail sales and subsidy payments. That could give policymakers something they have often lacked: a more detailed picture of how it moves from the supply chain to the farm.
But the success of this system is judged only by whether it can help India use fertilizer more efficiently, protect soil health and ensure that farmers receive what they actually need. For that to happen, the data must be accurate, farmers must be correctly represented in the system and digital assessments must account for the realities of farming. The next challenge is turning that information into better decisions—for farmers, for the soil and for the food system.
Society
Academic Diplomacy: How India Can Build Global Influence Through Universities
Academic diplomacy could give India a new source of global influence as universities, research networks and student mobility become tools of foreign policy.
As global power becomes more multipolar, India’s universities could become important instruments of academic diplomacy, building influence through students, research and institutional partnerships.
In an era characterised by fragmented geopolitics, economic realignments, and the gradual decay of unipolar hegemony, statecraft has expanded far beyond classic military projection and commercial leverage. Modern influence relies heavily on attraction, ideological alignment, and institutional networking—the foundational components of soft power. For decades, international relations theorists evaluated soft power through the lens of cultural export, public diplomacy, and foreign aid. However, as global power shifts toward a multipolar architecture, higher education has emerged as one of the most vital strategic arenas for long-term influence. Knowledge ecosystems, research networks, and student mobility are no longer merely domestic educational metrics; they are instrumentalities of geopolitical positioning. Within this evolving international framework, India stands at a critical juncture where its vast higher education apparatus must transform from an internal developmental tool into a primary engine of regional and global academic diplomacy.
Academic Diplomacy: How India Can Turn Universities into Global Influence
Academic diplomacy is different from conventional foreign policy, as it has a different timeline. Economic sanctions and defence alliances yield results in the short term, whereas academic diplomacy makes an impact through generations of diplomatic relationships. This diplomacy includes various strategies, such as having international experts, opening branches of universities abroad and organising joint research projects that create new elite-to-elite relationships. When policymakers, scholars and influential people from abroad are educated in the host country, they acquire knowledge about its culture, legal systems and values. In the past, Western countries have used their educational establishment to promote their liberal values in the world, educating people from underdeveloped countries, and bringing them into their intellectual network.
In the multipolar international order, the balance of academic competition is moving away from being centralised. Emerging economies acknowledge that depending on outside sources of knowledge has implications of certain risks, from intellectual dependency to brain drain. For India, building a strong system of academic diplomacy is more than just prestige, it is a necessity from the geopolitical point of view as the largest democracy institutions are gaining their place as leaders of the Global South. The educational landscape of India provides an opportunity to expand its influence in the regions of Asia, Africa, and beyond.
India’s Historical Legacy and Modern Mandates
The idea of India as a global educational beacon is historically rooted in its ancient heritage. Long before the establishment of the contemporary nation-states, ancient education centres acted as international centres of wisdom, luring people from all over Eurasia with the promise of learning subjects such as philosophy, geography, medicine, and logic. After gaining independence, the Indian government engaged in making use of this heritage through providing training and scholarships to students from various nations of Africa, the Mideast, and South Asia through its Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) Programme.
However, modern academic diplomacy demands a structural transition from historical nostalgia to modern institutional capacity. The contemporary global student population values institutional rankings, research infrastructure, seamless credit transfers, post-study work pathways, and political stability. While India’s premier technical institutions, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), enjoy immense global brand recognition, their historically insular focus on domestic intake limited their direct role in international student recruitment. Recognising this limitation, recent structural interventions detailed in the official framework of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 have sought to reposition Indian higher education as globally integrated, aiming to increase international student enrolment and facilitate internationalisation at home.
Mechanisms of Projection: Institutional Footprints and Internationalisation
India’s contemporary academic diplomacy operates across three major vectors: international student recruitment, institutional offshore expansion, and strategic multilateral knowledge networks. Government-backed platforms like the official Study in India Portal were designed to streamline entry procedures, provide specialised scholarships, and market Indian higher education across target regions in Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. The value proposition is distinct: high-quality technical, medical, and liberal arts instruction delivered in English at a fraction of the cost of Western universities. By catering to price-sensitive students from developing nations, India builds goodwill and deepens economic and social linkages with emerging markets.
Concurrently, the outbound deployment of Indian public institutions marks a shift in state strategy. The launch of overseas campuses, detailed in official announcements for IIT Madras in Zanzibar and the establishment of IIT Delhi in Abu Dhabi, signals a transition from passive recruitment to active global institutional presence. These campuses serve dual strategic functions. Locally, they address acute capacity deficits in high-tier technical training across host nations. Geopolitically, they establish permanent Indian institutional footholds in key oceanic and economic nodes, acting as hubs for joint technological innovation, industrial collaboration, and strategic regional presence.
Beyond physical campuses, multilateral platforms provide another crucial dynamic for academic influence. Through regional groupings and global South summits, India has increasingly prioritised academic collaboration, joint research grants, and climate-resilience research initiatives. By spearheading collaborative research in fields such as artificial intelligence, renewable energy, tropical medicine, and digital public infrastructure, India positions itself not as an extractive knowledge consumer, but as a co-creator of solutions tailored specifically for the developing world.
Structural Friction: Domestic Realities versus Foreign Policy Ambitions
In spite of its strategic aspirations for higher education, India is blocked by serious structural challenges in fulfilling its potential as an academic global power. The key obstacle continues to be the major disparities within the domestic academic setting. While elite state-owned universities provide first-class educational services, many entities of the academic system suffer from administrative issues, inconsistent infrastructural provisions, lack of teaching staff, and complex regulation. Academic diplomacy of a country depends very much on the quality of the academic institutions available in it; it is essential to maintain high standards at home in order to project one’s image to the world.
In addition, international students have troubles connecting to their academic surroundings, getting qualified help and assistance, and establishing diversity on campus. International researchers arriving in India face a wide range of bureaucratic issues connected to visa fixing, constraints applied to housing, and the lack of practical work opportunities.
Furthermore, the global competition for intellectual capital has intensified dramatically. Middle-income powers across Eurasia and East Asia are heavily subsidising their university sectors to attract international talent, creating a highly competitive landscape for global education. If India seeks to position its universities as preferred destinations for foreign talent, academic diplomacy must receive sustained fiscal backing, simplified regulatory oversight, and dedicated institutional autonomy to design programs tailored for foreign scholars.
The Road Ahead: Building an Intentional Academic Statecraft
To create a robust academic presence in a multipolar world, India should incorporate its higher education strategy into its larger foreign policy framework. Educational diplomacy should work in conjunction with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of External Affairs in order to function efficiently in time.
First, India must create specific scholarship schemes that would benefit future political, administrative, and technological leaders of the countries in the Global South. By providing fully merited scholarships to aspiring students from other countries, India will be able to reap high immediate diplomatic profits.
Second, authorities should give universities more operational autonomy when collaborating with foreign institutions. Making the process of obtaining dual degrees simpler, promoting joint degrees accreditation, and allowing more flexible systems of exchange can attract foreign universities and colleges to Indian institutions.
Third, academic diplomacy should not only be limited to STEM disciplines but should also span areas like social sciences, public policy, humanities, and environmental studies. In order to tackle complex global issues like climate change, digital ethics, poverty, and public health, India has a significant historical background with which it can be studied. Research institutions working on issues like Global South, simple innovation, and sustainable development should serve to transform Indian higher educational institutions into intellectual centres of the global governance debate.
Ultimately, higher education represents one of the most versatile and durable forms of soft power available to a rising state. In a global order increasingly characterised by geopolitical friction and economic volatility, classrooms and research laboratories offer spaces for sustained collaboration and shared progress. By strengthening domestic academic standards, removing administrative barriers, and projecting institutional capability abroad, India can transform its higher education ecosystem into a pillar of international diplomacy—advancing its national interests while contributing meaningfully to the global pool of knowledge.
Society
Six Months of the Hormuz Crisis: A USD 330 Billion Global Fuel Bill — and India’s USD 22.5 Billion Share
Six months into the Hormuz crisis, global fossil fuel importers have paid USD 330 billion above expected prices, with India’s additional bill reaching USD 22.5 billion.
EdPublica Data Desk | Analysis
Since the United States and Israel struck Iran on 28 February 2026 and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz collapsed, countries that import oil and gas by sea have paid more than USD 330 billion above what markets had expected to charge them, according to new research published by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). That works out to roughly USD 55 billion extra every month for half a year — the largest sustained fossil fuel price shock since the 1990 Gulf War, and one that is still running.
Hormuz crisis drives global fuel costs higher
India’s share of that bill is USD 22.5 billion, the second-highest of any country in the world, behind only China’s USD 35.5 billion and ahead of the United States, despite America being the world’s largest oil producer. That ranking is a direct consequence of how much of its energy India buys from abroad: the country imports close to 90 percent of the crude oil it uses, more than almost any other major economy, which leaves it with limited room to absorb a shock at the source.
India paid the second-highest fossil fuel import premium of any country over the six months to August 2026, behind only China. Source: CREA analysis. Illustration: EdPublica
A shock rivalled only by the 1990 Gulf War
CREA’s estimate is built from actual, ship-tracked cargo data — sourced from Kpler — for crude oil, refined fuels and gas that moved by sea between March and August 2026, compared against the futures prices the market had already set for those same delivery months in the twelve days before the strikes. Because both sides of the comparison are settlements of the same contract, the gap is a direct, like-for-like price difference rather than a modelled estimate. The analysis covers 170 countries and deliberately excludes pipeline gas, coal, fuel oil, naphtha, freight and war-risk insurance, all of which would push the true cost higher. CREA describes its USD 330 billion figure as conservative on that basis.
Brent crude’s trajectory over the six months traced a path familiar from past oil shocks: a sharp spike in the first weeks, a partial retreat, and a second surge later on. Prices briefly touched pre-war levels in late June before climbing back above USD 100 a barrel in late July, a pattern CREA’s researchers compared directly against the 1990 Gulf War, the 2019 Abqaiq attack and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Of those four episodes, only the Gulf War produced a larger and longer-lasting price premium than the current crisis.
Refined fuels rose faster than crude itself
Crude oil accounts for the largest single share of the extra cost, USD 164 billion, at an average premium of 35 percent over pre-war expectations. But the fuels people and businesses actually use day to day rose by a steeper proportion still. Diesel and gasoil were up 59 percent, adding USD 74 billion; gasoline rose 43 percent, adding USD 36 billion; jet fuel rose 59 percent, adding USD 20 billion; and LNG rose 60 percent in the Atlantic basin and 75 percent in the Pacific, adding USD 38 billion.
Refined fuels — diesel and gasoil in particular — rose by a steeper margin than crude oil itself. Source: CREA analysis. Illustration: EdPublica
Diesel’s premium mattered more than any other single figure in the analysis, because of how widely it is used. Industry, freight and farming all run substantially on diesel, so its price feeds directly into the cost of nearly everything else. Of the 170 countries CREA analysed, 134 paid more for diesel than their pre-war futures had implied. The war premium for diesel stayed above 55 percent in five of the six months, dipping to 43 percent in June before climbing back to 65 percent by August. Even the United States, the world’s largest oil producer, was not insulated: the average price of a gallon of diesel rose to USD 5.57 in the week of 17 August, the highest level since 2022 and closing in on that year’s record, according to AAA.
The clean energy dividend
The research’s central finding on mitigation is that a country’s exposure to the shock has been shaped less by geography than by how much of its power already comes from clean sources. Clean power capacity added since 2020 saved importing countries an estimated USD 36 billion in avoided coal, gas and oil imports in the first five months of the crisis alone. Of that, USD 10.6 billion existed only because of the war itself: every unit of coal or gas a country did not need to buy was a unit it did not have to purchase at inflated wartime prices, on top of whatever it would ordinarily have saved.
| “The best way to protect against high oil prices is to get off the black stuff as quickly as possible. Oil and gas prices have long proven to be an Achilles’ heel for both household finances and the global economy as a whole.” — Luke Wickenden, Energy Analyst, CREA |
“The energy transition is an investment,” Wickenden added, “so the best day to have started is yesterday.” Electrification is compounding the effect: the world’s electric vehicle fleet is on course to displace around five million barrels of oil a day by 2030, roughly comparable to the volume of crude Saudi Arabia currently moves through its East-West Yanbu pipeline specifically to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, according to the International Energy Agency’s Global EV Outlook.
Poorer countries are absorbing a bigger hit
The burden of the crisis has fallen unevenly by income, not just by geography. Low- and lower-middle-income countries paid an additional 1.0 percent of their 2024 GDP in higher fossil fuel costs, more than twice the 0.45 percent burden faced by high-income countries.
| “Across every fossil fuel product, this crisis is a multi-car pile-up, and where you land depends on what you’re driving. Wealthier nations, for whom paying extra is less of a burden in the short term, can absorb the higher prices. That’s not the case for lower-income countries that are far more price-sensitive. The countries best placed are the ones already in the EV lane: with fuel imports slashed, they can skirt the pile-up altogether.” — Luke Wickenden, Energy Analyst, CREA |
India’s particular exposure
India’s position in the top three is not simply a function of the size of its economy. The country entered 2026 already navigating a difficult trade-off on energy: after Washington imposed additional tariffs on Indian exports over New Delhi’s imports of discounted Russian crude, India had been cutting back on Russian oil and increasing purchases from the Middle East in pursuit of a US trade deal. The Hormuz crisis disrupted that shift almost immediately, cutting off much of the Middle Eastern supply India had been leaning on and pushing it back toward Russian crude even as prices climbed and a separate US sanctions waiver on Russian oil purchases lapsed in April.
By June, India’s total crude imports had hit a monthly record of roughly five million barrels a day, with Russian supplies alone reaching an unprecedented 2.6 million barrels a day — 54 percent of the country’s total crude imports, and more than double the volume seen in February. That pivot briefly inverted the usual arithmetic: discounted Urals crude, which had traded well below Brent since 2022, began trading at a premium to it in March, as Indian and Chinese refiners competed for the limited Russian cargoes still reaching them outside the Gulf. By July, as Gulf supply chains began to normalise, Urals discounts had reopened to more than USD 10 a barrel below Brent.
Russian crude functioned, in effect, as India’s insurance policy against a disruption its strategic reserves were not large enough to absorb on their own — but insurance still has a premium, and India’s USD 22.5 billion bill is a measure of how much of that premium it ultimately paid, on top of what it saved through the Russian discount.
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