India’s oil imports from the US jumped over 270 per cent year-on-year in the first four months of 2025, underscoring Delhi’s strategy of enhancing American imports amid trade pact negotiations and diversifying its sources of crude oil in a volatile geopolitical and geo-economic environment.
Negotiations between India and the US for an interim trade deal by July 9 have entered their final phase.
According to the latest available data with the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCIS), India imported 6.31 million tonnes of US crude in January-April, sharply up from 1.69 million tonnes in the year-ago period. With this, the US accounted for 7 per cent of India’s oil imports for January-April 2025, significantly higher than 2 per cent in the corresponding four months of 2024.
In value terms, India’s US crude imports in the first four months of the current calendar year stood at $3.78 billion, a big jump from around $ 1 billion in the year-ago period. It is worth noting that not just volumes, but oil price fluctuations also play a crucial role in determining the value of imports.
India is stepping up imports from the US across categories to address America’s key concern of a widening goods trade deficit. Under the likely trade deal, India is also expected to open up its market to a range of American goods – from cars and defence equipment to agricultural products. Official data show that while India’s overall imports in April rose by only 19 per cent, imports from the US jumped 63 per cent to $5.24 billion, up from $3.20 billion in April 2024. This rise in imports narrowed India’s goods trade surplus with the US to $3.1 billion, down from $3.4 billion.
Expanding energy trade with the US would, to an extent, allay Washington’s concerns about the balance of trade between the two countries. Also, from a strategic and energy security perspective, stepping up purchases of American oil helps India with some leverage with other supplying nations, whose supply volumes may be dented as a result, according to sources. The aim there would be to nudge them to offer oil to India at even better prices in a bid to protect their market share.
Additionally, given the tensions in West Asia, sourcing oil from regions that can completely bypass the region’s shipping routes is strategically important for India, which depends on imports to meet over 88 per cent of crude oil requirement. High import dependency and growing energy consumption make the country an attractive market for oil and gas exporters.
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President Donald Trump has been eyeing increasing energy exports to India and in February, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the US, the President said that India and the US had agreed to take steps towards making Washington “a leading supplier of oil and gas to India”, which could help bridge the trade deficit between the two countries. Trump said that the US will “hopefully” be India’s top oil and gas supplier.
The jump in overall imports in April – potentially signalling a broader trend – was driven by a sharp 270 per cent year-on-year increase in oil imports to 3.56 million tonnes. In March, too, US oil imports surged 247 per cent year-on-year to 1.26 million tonnes. Overall, the share of US crude in India’s oil imports rose from 4.6 per cent in April 2024 to 12 per cent this year. That’s higher than the 4.7 per cent recorded just a month earlier in March.
