Karmic debt over India and possible future disintegration

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Production stands at 685 kb/d, which is likely to be the peak, the midpoint of depletion having been passed in 2002. At the current Depletion Rate of 4.4%, production is set to fall to about 500 kb/d by 2010 and 330 kb/s by 2020. Consumption stands at 2.4 Mb/d, giving the country a large and growing need of imports, which will be increasingly difficult to obtain. This readily explains why State-backed Indian companies are taking up rights overseas in for example the Sudan, Libya, Iran and Venezuela (see also Items 511 and 513).

The country's gas potential is also limited. Only 42 Tcf have been discovered, of which 13 Tcf have been produced. Production stands at about 2 Tcf/a. The country has substantial coal deposits, although some have a high arsenic content which has caused serious environmental damage in the past. India has recently enjoyed something of an economic boom, based in part on services run through the Internet. Western manufacturers have also set up to benefit from cheap labour. It is however likely to be a short-lived chapter of relative prosperity, as imported energy becomes at first expensive and then in short supply. An economic downturn will likely impinge on an already fragile political structure, rendered even more difficult by the country's huge population of more than a billion. How India will fare during the Second Half of the Oil Age is hard to predict, but disintegration is a possible outcome, as people revert to their old communal and religious identities, a process which will probably be accompanied by much bloodshed and suffering. Clearly, the present population far exceeds the carrying capacity of the land, but the Indian is blessed by a smiling, benign spirituality that helps.