Burning Earth, Broken Chains: Why India’s Fossil Fuel Dependency Has Become a Climate and Security Crisis ?

Burning Earth, Broken Chains: Why India‘s Fossil Fuel Dependency Has Become a Climate and Security Crisis – and What Must Change Now?

From Assam‘s floods and India’s record heat to war-driven oil shocks and the military’s hidden carbon footprint, the evidence is overwhelming. Conservation alone will not save us. Only a civilisational rethink will.

PAHARI BARUAH

There is a moment in every slowly unfolding catastrophe when denial becomes impossible. That moment, for India’s relationship with fossil fuels, climate change, and the geopolitics of energy, has arrived – not in the future but in the scorching, flooding, economically destabilised present. The question is no longer whether the crisis is real. It is whether those in power, and those who elect them, will respond with the depth and urgency the evidence demands.

In the summer of 2025, parts of Rajasthan recorded temperatures of 48 degrees Celsius. Regions like Assam and the Himalayan states – historically considered cooler buffer zones – reported heat fatalities for the first time in living memory. India’s February 2025 was the warmest in 124 years of recorded history. These are not anomalies. They are the compounding outputs of a broken relationship between human civilization and the planet’s atmosphere – and India, home to 1.4 billion people, sits dangerously close to the centre of the storm.

The Human Cost India Is Not Fully Counting: The Heat Death Crisis

Official figures on heat-related deaths in India are, by the admission of the country’s own public health experts, a vast undercount. The National Centre for Disease Control reported just 14 confirmed heat deaths between March 1 and June 24, 2025. Independent analysis by HeatWatch documented at least 84 fatalities in the same period, while peer-reviewed research suggests the true toll is orders of magnitude higher. A single day of heatwave conditions across India, according to modelling by climate health researchers, can cause tens of thousands of excess deaths – deaths that are classified under heart failure, respiratory collapse, or dehydration, with heat recorded as no cause at all.

These are not statistics. These are farmers, construction workers, schoolchildren, street vendors, and the elderly – disproportionately poor, disproportionately unprotected, and disproportionately dying in a crisis they did not create but are paying for with their lives. The moral weight of this asymmetry cannot be overstated. India is the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world today, but its per-capita emissions remain a fraction of those in wealthy industrialised nations that built their prosperity on fossil fuels for over a century. Climate justice demands that this fact remain central to every policy conversation that follows.

Assam on the Front Line

If you want to understand what climate breakdown looks like at the human scale, look at Assam. Not at its government buildings or its tea estates, but at its river embankments – and at the people who rebuild them every year, only to watch them dissolve again in the next flood.

In May and June 2025, pre-monsoon storms of unprecedented intensity struck Assam and the broader Northeast. Silchar, the state’s second-largest city, recorded 415.8 mm of rainfall in a single 24-hour period. Guwahati received 111 mm in one day. Over 500,000 people faced displacement. Sixty-five revenue circles were submerged. Eighteen municipal wards of Guwahati itself flooded. Scientists at Cotton University documented what climate researchers had long predicted: climate change is shifting the southwest monsoon in Northeast India from June to May – making the most dangerous season arrive earlier and hit harder than the region’s infrastructure is built to survive.

What makes Assam particularly painful to observe is that the region possesses extraordinary ecological wealth – the Brahmaputra basin, biodiversity corridors, wetland systems, indigenous farming wisdom – that could, if protected and developed wisely, serve as a global model for climate-resilient civilisation. Instead, the scrapping of Assam’s clean energy policy in 2025 sent precisely the opposite signal at precisely the wrong moment. The state’s future depends on whether its leaders choose ecological intelligence or ecological recklessness. That choice is being made right now.

“The Brahmaputra does not negotiate with policy timelines. It rises when the atmosphere tells it to. And increasingly, the atmosphere is speaking in a language that human infrastructure was not built to understand.”

The USD 137 Billion Trap: India’s Fossil Fuel Dependency in Numbers

To understand why India’s political leaders have begun – however tentatively – speaking the language of conservation and restraint, one must understand what fossil fuel dependency is costing the nation in hard, audited numbers.

In financial year 2025, India imported 234 million tonnes of crude oil at a cost of approximately USD 137 billion. Its domestic crude production stands at just 28 million tonnes – meaning that 89.4 percent of the country’s crude oil supply is imported. Natural gas imports have risen 67 percent over the past decade and now, for the first time, exceed domestic production. India’s proved crude oil reserves have declined 12 percent since 2014; natural gas reserves have fallen 25 percent. The country is depleting what it has, importing more of what it needs, and paying dearly for the privilege every time a conflict erupts near a shipping lane.

The Strait of Hormuz – the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman through which more than two-thirds of India’s oil imports and nearly half its liquefied natural gas transit – is not a pipeline. It is a geopolitical gamble renewed every day. When tensions in West Asia escalate, when missiles are fired near shipping lanes, when the threat of blockade rises, India’s fuel prices, inflation rates, foreign exchange reserves, and subsidy bills feel it within weeks. In FY2023, when global energy prices spiked, the Indian government was forced to cut excise duties on petrol and diesel while paying INR 22,000 crore to compensate oil PSU losses on LPG. The taxpayer absorbed a crisis made in another country’s conflict.

India’s energy PSUs invested INR 2.33 trillion in fossil fuel projects in FY2025 – nearly eight times their combined clean energy investment of INR 0.30 trillion. The numbers reveal a system still structurally committed to the very dependency it publicly acknowledges as a vulnerability. Appeals for restraint in fuel consumption are, in this context, not a climate policy. They are a symptom of a system that has not yet built the infrastructure to offer any alternative.

Military Emissions and the Climate Silence

There is a category of greenhouse gas emissions that appears in almost no national climate commitment, no Paris Agreement disclosure, and no NDC submitted to the UN. It is one of the largest single sources of carbon on earth. It is the military.

Global militaries are responsible for an estimated 5.5 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions – double the share of the entire commercial aviation industry, and comparable to the agricultural sector. In 2024, global military expenditure surpassed USD 2.7 trillion. A 2025 study published in Nature Communications found that a one percent escalation in global military spending as a share of GDP increases carbon emission intensity by 0.04 kg per dollar – and that the wars of the past three decades, from Afghanistan to Ukraine, have together accounted for 27 percent of the total change in CO₂ emission intensity between 1995 and 2023.

Wars are not merely a political or humanitarian catastrophe. They are a climate catastrophe. They burn oil. They destroy forests. They contaminate water systems. They detonate carbon stored in infrastructure, ecosystems, and human bodies. And they consume the fiscal resources that governments might otherwise direct toward renewable energy, public health, and climate adaptation. The conversation about climate change is incomplete – dangerously, inexcusably incomplete – without an honest accounting of what the global military-industrial complex is doing to the atmosphere every day, whether it is in peacetime or at war.

Organic Farming, Electric Transit, and the Northeast’s Ecological Intelligence

The data does not only describe a crisis. It also describes a direction. And that direction – if followed with the seriousness the numbers demand – leads toward a genuinely different kind of civilisation.

India’s renewable energy capacity reached approximately 275 GW by early 2026 – a genuine achievement. But the pace of addition, averaging 20 GW per year since FY2021, remains far below the 500 GW non-fossil target set for 2030. The gap between ambition and deployment is not technical. It is political. Land policy bottlenecks, grid evacuation failures, inconsistent financing, and the continuing structural bias of state energy enterprises toward fossil investment are the real obstacles. They are solvable. They require will, not miracle.

Work-from-home systems, if institutionalised beyond emergency measures, offer another underestimated lever. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated at scale that millions of daily fossil-fuel commutes could be eliminated without economic collapse. Hybrid systems in government offices, educational institutions, and service-sector employers in cities like Guwahati could meaningfully reduce urban transport emissions while improving quality of life – particularly for women, for whom long commutes carry disproportionate safety and time costs.

What Assam, India, and the World Must Decide

The language of climate emergency has been in circulation for decades. What has changed – what the data for 2025 and 2026 makes unmistakably clear – is that the emergency is no longer approaching. It is here, visible in the flood displacement figures from Guwahati’s municipal wards, in the heat mortality data from Uttar Pradesh and Odisha, in the import bills paid with borrowed foreign exchange, and in the war-zone carbon reports that the Paris Agreement does not yet require anyone to count.

The path forward is not mysterious. It requires a shift in agriculture from chemical dependence to ecological intelligence. It requires investment in public transport, electrified rail, and cycling infrastructure rather than more roads and more private vehicles. It requires the protection of forests, rivers, and wetlands as the climate infrastructure they genuinely are. It requires honest accounting of military emissions and the courage to name war as a climate crime. And it requires the political imagination to see that a society organised around sustainability, dignity, and ecological balance is not a sacrifice – it is an upgrade.

Northeast India, if its leaders choose wisely, possesses the ecological assets, the indigenous knowledge systems, and the cultural relationship with land and river that could make it a living model of what this transition looks like in practice. The Brahmaputra is not a problem to be engineered around. It is an intelligence system that has sustained life in this region for millennia. The question is whether the 21st century will learn from it – or continue trying to overpower it.

“The planet does not issue warnings indefinitely. Every flood season, every heat record, every billion dollars spent on oil from a conflict zone is another page of the final notice. The clock is not running out. It has run out. What remains is the choice.”

Key sources

CSE / Down to Earth – Climate India 2025 Report (Nov 2025) · HeatWatch India – Struck by Heat 2025 · Yale Program on Climate Change Communication – Climate Change in the Indian Mind (2025) · Global Heat Health Information Network – Lost in the Heat (2025) · IISD – Mapping India’s Energy Policy 2026 · Dataful.in / FACTLY – India’s Import Energy Dependence Data (Apr 2026) · New Security Beat -Energy Security and Global Climate: India (Nov 2025) · IPB – Climate Collateral 2025 Update · Nature Communications – Rising Military Spending and GHG Emissions (May 2025) · American Academy of Arts and Sciences — Conflict’s Carbon Footprint (2025) · Sentinel Assam – Climate Change in Assam (Aug 2025) · Ajmal IAS Academy – Climate Change in Assam Data (Oct 2025) · Down to Earth – Northeast Deluge 2025 (Jun 2025) · Asian Confluence – Assam Floods and Climate Change.

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