Energy security is routinely discussed as a feeling. It is not. A country can talk itself into confidence and still lack the fuel to run the day. Psychological assurance has its place in statecraft. It does not generate a kilowatt, a barrel, or a cargo. Security has two connotations, and confusing them is expensive. One is psychological: how secure a person feels depends on that person, and how secure a country feels depends on the combined psyche of its society. One can be fully alive to real dangers and still choose to feel secure. That is one part of the task.

The other part has nothing to do with psychology. Households, industry, services and transport need energy in physical form. Cars have to move. Aircraft have to fly. Euphoria will not produce it. On energy, policy has to deal in real terms. India is a particularly large version of this problem. The United States and China consume more energy in absolute terms, but on an incremental basis India has emerged as one of the top consumers. Population is rising, and demand is rising with it. Domestic production does not cover what the economy needs, so a large share is imported. That is the structural fact on which any serious energy-security strategy has to rest.

For households, part of the answer can be domestic and distributed: rooftop solar, solar thermal and similar options that meet a share of demand at the point of consumption. For the grid, the story has already changed once. India once lived with a peak power shortage of about 18 per cent. It is now close to self-sufficient in generation. That is real progress. The mainstay of that generation, however, remains coal. Domestic coal is often high in ash; imported coal, including from Indonesia, Australia and elsewhere, can be high in sulphur, with the environmental costs that follow. Cleaner combustion has advanced — supercritical and ultra-supercritical plants have cut the emissions profile of what is burned compared with thirty or forty years ago — and carbon capture, use and storage remain a possibility not yet pursued at scale. Coal is still central, and part of it is still imported.

Oil and gas pose a different problem. They are a mainstay not of the power sector alone but of the wider energy economy, above all mobility. Electric vehicles do not dissolve the constraint. Electricity still has to be produced from something — coal, gas, solar or another source — and that choice decides whether the electron is domestic or imported. A cleaner end-use can still rest on an insecure fuel. Energy security has to be read application by application, not slogan by slogan. If the aim is that as much as possible of what India needs is produced at home, and that what must be imported arrives through supply chains that cannot be interrupted by extraneous pressure, then the strategy cannot sit in the energy ministry alone. Sanctions by the United States can already create hurdles in procuring energy from countries that have been partners for a long time, including Russia. Foreign policy therefore sits inside energy security. So do economic policy and fiscal policy. When crude oil trades near $100 a barrel, the consumer pays, or the government subsidises what the consumer cannot bear. That subsidy comes from the fiscal account. The price of a barrel is not only an energy number; it is a budget number.

Producing more at home raises the same joint problem. More exploration and more production of oil and gas require capital that the private sector alone will not supply at the scale and risk involved. Incentive, risk-sharing and, where necessary, public support come back into view. Energy security is not a sectoral file. It is the intersection of geology, technology, diplomacy and the exchequer. The conversation now under way —from vulnerability to strategic autonomy, in a fragmented Asia — is worth having only if it ends in that kind of joint strategy. Discussion can flag the issues. Securing the molecules is the work of the government. Even light needs energy.