PM Modi urges India to use petrol, diesel and gas with 'great restraint' as Hormuz blockade lifts global fuel prices

On Sunday, May 10, 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked Indians to use petrol, diesel and gas with great restraint, calling it the need of the hour while the Strait of Hormuz blockade keeps global crude prices elevated and the country's oil marketing companies absorb roughly Rs 30,000 crore of under-recoveries every month. He framed the appeal as a national-interest call rather than a tax-and-pass measure, urging citizens to cut imported fuel use, postpone gold purchases, defer non-essential foreign travel, and revive work-from-home and virtual conference habits popularised during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Modi was speaking at the Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC) in Telangana, where he virtually inaugurated and laid the foundation stone for development projects worth around Rs 9,400 crore, with Telangana Governor Shiv Pratap Shukla, Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy, and Union Ministers G. Kishan Reddy and Bandi Sanjay Kumar in attendance. The conservation appeal sat inside a larger speech on infrastructure, manufacturing and India's posture during what he described as a major energy crisis in the world.

What Modi said in Hyderabad

The operative quote, carried verbatim by PTI and reported across major Indian outlets, was: "the need of the hour is also to use petrol, gas, diesel and such things with great restraint. We have to use imported petro products only as per need. This will not only save foreign exchange but reduce the adverse impact of war." The framing is unusual for a serving Indian prime minister: explicit consumption guidance to citizens rather than the usual reliance on price signals or supply-side management.

Speaking from Secunderabad, he also said this was a moment demanding unity and commitment, asking the country to make a resolution keeping duty paramount and to fulfil it with complete dedication. The rhetorical tilt borrowed deliberately from the Atal Behari Vajpayee-era moral-economy register that older voters associate with national-interest appeals during shocks like the 1990 Gulf war and the 1991 balance-of-payments crisis.

The four asks behind the conservation appeal

Read together, Modi's speech contained four discrete asks for households and firms.

One: Use petrol, diesel and gas with restraint. Specifically, citizens in cities with metro connectivity should rely on public transport and metro rail wherever possible, carpool where they can, and owners of electric vehicles should maximise their use. Two: Avoid buying gold for a year, regardless of personal or social occasions, since gold imports are a major outflow of foreign exchange. Three: Postpone non-essential foreign travel for at least a year—he flagged the rising trend of overseas weddings and vacations as a forex pressure point. Four: Revive work-from-home and online meeting practices used during the COVID-19 pandemic, with reduced edible-oil consumption added in some accounts of the address.

These are not new categories on India's import-bill heat map. They are the four largest discretionary demand-side levers a government can plausibly pull without changing prices or imposing rationing—and Modi pulled all four on the same day.

The Hormuz mechanism: how a Gulf war shows up at the Indian pump

The conflict, Indian Express noted in its summary, began on February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel carried out coordinated strikes on Iran. Tehran retaliated with strikes on neighbours and Israel and effectively choked the Strait of Hormuz, the maritime corridor through which roughly one-fifth of global oil and natural gas flows pass in normal times. With vessel movements through the strait severely curtailed, supplies have been hit and the global price of crude has surged.

India is one of the largest oil importers in the world and depends on imports for the majority of its crude needs. Crucially, fuel prices in the country are not directly linked to global benchmarks: retail prices are reset by government-owned oil marketing companies (OMCs) in consultation with the Ministry of Petroleum, with stability often prioritised over a strict pass-through to households. That delinking is what protects motorists in the short run; it is also what concentrates the war shock on the OMCs' balance sheets in the medium run.

Pump-side arithmetic: the Rs 30,000 crore monthly squeeze

Indian Express had earlier reported that government-owned OMCs—Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), Bharat Petroleum (BPCL) and Hindustan Petroleum (HPCL)—were running up costs of about Rs 30,000 crore a month on petrol, diesel and cooking gas (LPG) sales. The driver is a widening under-recovery: the gap between the import-linked cost of refined product and the retail price the OMC is permitted to charge.

Sujata Sharma, Joint Secretary in the Petroleum Ministry, told the same paper that retail prices have not changed despite rising global prices. The government has not committed to compensating OMCs for losses on the sale of petrol, diesel, and jet fuel below market prices; sources cited by Indian Express read those public comments as a signal that a price hike is imminent, with the OMCs themselves calling for an increase. The headline retail anchors in Delhi still read Rs 94.77 per litre for petrol, Rs 87.67 per litre for diesel, and Rs 913 for a 14.2-kg domestic LPG cylinder, with state-level levies producing dispersion across cities.

Behind those frozen pump prices, the Indian crude basket averaged about $70 per barrel through the previous year and rose past $113 per barrel in April 2026. Refiners absorbed additional costs from emergency crude sourcing, surging shipping and war-risk insurance rates, and the disruption to standard procurement schedules. The longer this gap widens, the harder it becomes politically to keep the retail price wall intact without either a tax cut, a subsidy bill, or a hike that flows through to consumer-price inflation.

India's energy levers Modi cited

Inside the same speech, Modi rehearsed the structural answers his government is leaning on for the medium term. He pointed to India having moved into the top countries in the world on solar power capacity, and said unprecedented work had been done on ethanol blending in petrol—a programme that targets blended levels of 20 percent (E20) as part of reducing crude import volumes. He flagged the push for 100 percent LPG coverage under the Ujjwala line of policies, and the rollout of piped gas at affordable rates plus a CNG-based system as alternative transport fuels.

These initiatives are real and structural, but they are not short-term shock absorbers. Solar and ethanol shift the mix of energy supply over years; they cannot offset a sudden Hormuz-driven crude price spike inside a single fiscal quarter. That is why the speech paired the medium-term portfolio with the immediate behavioural ask: structural transition is the long answer, restraint is the short one.

What Modi inaugurated alongside the appeal

The conservation message landed inside a busy infrastructure event. Modi virtually laid the foundation for the four-laning of National Highway-167 from Gudebellur to Mahabubnagar on the Hyderabad-Panaji Economic Corridor, and for the Zaheerabad Industrial Area in Sangareddy district. He inaugurated sections of the Kazipet-Vijayawada multi-tracking project of the railways, a Greenfield POL (Petroleum, Oil, Lubricants) Terminal in Hyderabad, the Kazipet Rail Under Rail Bypass, and the PM MITRA Park at Warangal—the Kakatiya Mega Textile Park.

Built at an estimated Rs 1,700 crore, the Kakatiya Mega Textile Park is described by the government as India's first fully functional PM MITRA Park, designed to operationalise the Centre's 5F vision—Farm to Fibre to Factory to Fashion to Foreign. Putting a textile-export and POL-terminal commissioning beside a fuel-restraint speech is itself an analytical signal: the government is using a single platform to pair behavioural conservation with capacity additions that, over time, can lower import dependency.

Whose foreign exchange this protects, and why it matters now

Modi explicitly framed the asks as forex-saving moves. India's foreign exchange reserves, deployed by the Reserve Bank of India, sit at the centre of how the country defends the rupee during oil shocks and how it pays for emergency crude lifts when shipping and insurance markets price in war. The country also imports gold in large quantities—both for jewellery demand and as a household savings instrument—making it the second-largest single drag on the trade account after crude in stress months.

Each of Modi's asks maps onto a specific bucket. Petrol, diesel and gas restraint lowers the volume of crude oil and LPG/LNG imports the country needs to fund. No-gold-for-a-year trims the gold import bill. No-foreign-travel reduces tourism-linked foreign currency outflows. Work-from-home indirectly cuts transport fuel demand. None of these alone moves the macro number quickly; together, if a meaningful share of the middle-class cohort acts on them, the marginal forex pressure during a sustained Hormuz blockade can be visibly lighter.

What restraint can and cannot do

There are honest limits worth naming. Behavioural appeals work only as long as the underlying pressure persists; once the war ends or alternative supply lines stabilise, demand bounces back. Public-transport substitution depends on metro and bus capacity that is uneven across Indian cities and effectively absent in many smaller urban centres. Carpool culture is far less developed than in some Western markets, and the electric vehicle fleet, while growing, is still a small fraction of total registered vehicles—particularly in two-wheelers, which dominate Indian fuel demand at the household level.

Restraint also does not solve the OMC under-recovery problem. As long as global prices stay above retail-implied cost, the cost is borne somewhere—either by the OMCs through losses, by the government through cuts in excise duty or a fresh subsidy allocation, or by consumers through an eventual price hike. The political question is how the burden is distributed; the conservation appeal does not change that question, but it does buy time for the answer.

What to watch in the next two weeks

Three concrete signals will tell readers whether this appeal is paired with deeper policy moves. First, whether the OMCs announce a retail price hike on petrol, diesel and LPG—the Petroleum Ministry's recent posture suggests this is being teed up. Second, whether the Centre moves on excise duty or signals a one-off subsidy or bond issue to compensate OMCs, which would shift the burden from balance sheets to fiscal accounts. Third, whether state governments trim their own VAT on fuel to cushion pump-price moves, which is where political contestation usually concentrates.

Beyond pump pricing, watch monthly forex reserves disclosures from the RBI, gold and crude import volumes in the next DGCI&S trade release, and any explicit work-from-home advisories or state-level transport subsidies that translate Modi's appeal into administrative action. Behavioural appeals without operational follow-up tend to soft-fade within a few news cycles; a coordinated package with Centre, RBI and OMC moves can convert restraint into measured forex savings.

Bottom line

Modi's Hyderabad speech is the first serving prime ministerial address since the February 28 war that explicitly calls on Indian households to ration their own fuel, gold, and overseas-travel demand to absorb the Hormuz shock. The crude basket at over $113 per barrel, an OMC monthly squeeze around Rs 30,000 crore, and a price hike that the Petroleum Ministry has signalled as imminent are the hard numbers behind the appeal. Conservation alone will not close the gap; combined with a calibrated price reset, fiscal cushioning, and the structural push on solar, ethanol, LPG and CNG, it can soften the worst of the war shock. The next move belongs to the OMCs and the Finance Ministry—whether they translate this Hyderabad message into a coherent policy package will determine if great restraint is a slogan or a strategy.