Cabinet clears ₹84,084 crore Samudra Manthan scheme to unlock India’s offshore oil and gas reserves

New Delhi: The Union Cabinet, chaired by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, on Friday approved a ₹84,084 crore scheme to accelerate the search for oil and gas beneath India’s seabed. Named Samudra Manthan – the National Offshore Exploration Scheme – it will run through the 2030-31 financial year. It marks one of the largest single commitments New Delhi has made to energy exploration in years.

The National Offshore Exploration Scheme, a scheme of the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas has been approved with an outlay of ₹84,084 crore.

The scheme is designed to cover the entire offshore exploration chain rather than any single link in it. It provides for large-scale acquisition, processing and interpretation of high-quality seismic data, accelerated deepwater and ultra-deepwater exploratory drilling, and scientific drilling in frontier basins, alongside the development of common offshore production and evacuation infrastructure and an integrated oil and gas manufacturing and services zone.

Digital programme management, capacity building and international stakeholder engagement have also been written into its design.

Briefing reporters after the Cabinet meeting, the Union minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, pointed to the scale of what lies untapped. Within India’s exclusive economic zone – the area of the sea over which the country holds sovereign rights and privileges – there are significant reserves of hydrocarbons, including oil and natural gas, he said.

That framing goes some way towards explaining why the government has chosen to back the sector with public money rather than wait for private capital alone to test these waters.

Officials expect the scheme to catalyse reserve accretion of more than 600 million metric tonnes of oil equivalent over its lifetime. It is also billed to substantially increase offshore exploration activity, lift domestic oil and gas production, generate large-scale employment, strengthen indigenous manufacturing under
“Make in India” and “Atmanirbhar Bharat”, and build a globally competitive ecosystem for offshore technologies and services.

None of this is being sold as an isolated initiative. The government has linked the scheme to the prime minister’s vision, set out from the Red Fort on Independence Day 2025, of a modern-day Samudra Manthan capable of unlocking India’s offshore energy potential and advancing the broader goal of a developed India, or “Viksit Bharat”.

What is Samudra Manthan?

Samudra Manthan – literally, “the churning of the ocean” – is one of the oldest and most recognizable stories in Hindu mythology. According to the Puranas, the devas (gods) and asuras (demons) called a temporary truce and worked together to churn the cosmic ocean, using Mount Mandara as the churning rod and the serpent Vasuki as the rope. The aim was to recover amrita, the nectar of immortality, along with a series of other treasures believed to lie hidden within the ocean’s depths.

The churning was neither quick nor easy. It threw up poison before it yielded anything of value, and only sustained, coordinated effort eventually produced the nectar the two sides had been seeking.

That is precisely the imagery the government has borrowed for its offshore exploration push. India’s continental shelf and exclusive economic zone are believed to hold substantial hydrocarbon reserves, but much of this territory remains poorly surveyed, particularly in deepwater and ultra-deepwater zones along the east coast and around the Andaman Islands.

Turning that geological promise into usable reserves requires exactly the kind of patient, well-resourced effort the myth describes – seismic surveys, deep drilling, and years of interpretation before a single barrel is confirmed.

The scheme’s name signals an argument the government has made before: that India’s hydrocarbon shortfall has been less about a lack of resources and more about historically limited investment in exploration infrastructure and offshore drilling capacity. Independent industry estimates have suggested India has drilled only around 30 exploratory wells a year across its entire upstream sector – a modest figure set against the size of its offshore acreage.

India has historically drilled approximately 30 exploratory wells per year across its entire upstream sector, a figure that represents a profound underinvestment in geological knowledge creation given the scale of the country’s offshore acreage. Samudra Manthan is the government’s attempt to close that gap.