The Strait That Keeps India Up at Night

Why the Hormuz chokepoint is exposing a fatal flaw in how Indian businesses think about supply chain risk — and the data-driven reckoning now underway The conversation stayed with me for months. A procurement head at a mid-sized Indian chemical company — experienced, diligent, someone who had spent years building what he believed was a resilient supplier network — leaned across the table and said something that changed the way I think about supply chain risk. “We think we’ve diversified. We source from six different countries. But I just realized they all ship through the same corridor.” That corridor is the Strait of Hormuz. And that single sentence encapsulates one of the most underappreciated vulnerabilities in Indian business today. India’s Hormuz Dependency — The Numbers at a Glance 40% 85% 60% 20-25 of India's crude oil imports pass through Hormuz of India's crude oil is imported of India's LPG sourced via the Gulf region days of strategic petroleum reserve buffer Source: India Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas; EIA; Analyst estimates, 2025 The Lifeline Most People Ignore For most people, the Strait of Hormuz is a geography lesson half-remembered from school — a narrow waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, roughly 33 kilometers at its narrowest navigable point. For India, it is something else entirely. It is an artery. Close to 40% of India’s crude oil imports pass through this single corridor, flowing in from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait. When something goes wrong at Hormuz, the arithmetic becomes deeply uncomfortable, very quickly. But here is what surprises most people when I explain it: the disruption is never only about fuel. It is about everything downstream from fuel.   “Diversifying your suppliers is not the same as diversifying your supply chain. If every vendor ships through the same corridor, you’ve only distributed your risk across more spreadsheet cells.” India’s Crude Oil Import Sources: Hormuz Concentration Risk Figure 1 — Share of India’s Crude Oil Imports by Country (2024-25 est.) Source Share of Imports % Share Iraq ██████ 22% Russia ██████████ 36% Saudi Arabia ████ 14% UAE ███ 10% USA ██ 8% Others ███ 10% Note: Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and UAE shipments primarily transit the Strait of Hormuz. Russia routes via Cape of Good Hope or Arctic corridor. Source: ImexDBusiness analysis, 2025. What the chart above makes clear is both reassuring and sobering in equal measure. India’s pivot toward Russian