India's upstream oil and gas problem is not that the sedimentary basins are known to be empty but that most of them have never been properly looked at — only about a tenth of the country's sedimentary basin area was under active exploration as of 2024. Successive policy attempts have tried to change the incentives rather than the geology: the Hydrocarbon Exploration and Licensing Policy (HELP) replaced the older production sharing regime with a revenue-sharing contract and a single licence covering conventional and unconventional hydrocarbons, and the Open Acreage Licensing Policy (OALP) let companies pick the blocks they wanted rather than waiting for the government to offer them. Samudra Manthan attacks the other half of the problem by putting public money directly into the expensive, high-risk data acquisition and drilling that private bidders will not fund on their own.

With crude oil import dependence at 88.6% in April-January of 2025-26, India's oil bill is a standing drain on the current account and a permanent exposure to geopolitical shocks in West Asia and to shipping disruption. Domestic offshore production is the only lever that reduces the physical import requirement rather than merely hedging its price. The scheme's emphasis on deepwater and ultra-deepwater drilling reflects where the unexplored acreage actually is, and the provision for common production and evacuation infrastructure addresses a specific market failure: a single operator will not build a pipeline or platform that only becomes economic if several nearby discoveries share it.