ONGC, India's largest up- stream oil and natural gas producing company is successfully leading the country's efforts to become self-reliant in oil production, thereby ensuring oil security to India (in the background of events like the Iraq war) which is bound to become one of the world's largest oil consuming country by 2010. Even now, India stands one among the top oil consuming countries and imports almost 70% of its oil requirements from the Middle East. If it is not for the efforts put in by ONGC Videsh, a subsidiary of the parent company which is enforced to operate abroad by not just entering into equity partnerships with other oil companies, but operating oil fields by its own in foreign countries, India might have been still left far behind in oil exploration and production. Other oil majors like Reliance and Indian Oil are complementing these efforts towards attaining complete oil security for India as envisioned in the India Hydrocarbons Vision Document-2025 formulated by the Government of India. The journey manifesting the phenomenal growth of ONGC to become one of the top wealth creating companies in India from that of an average performer in the last decade (with diminishing crude production and dwindling reserves every year) is indeed interesting. The turnaround as it happened was not a cakewalk. Addressing to its problems one after the other in a phased manner within a stipulated time period worked wonders for the company.

Restructuring and vertical integration form the core elements of the turnaround program for ONGC, which was initiated by its Chairman Subir Raha. In his opinion, as reported in Business Today (April 13, 2003), ONGC had reached a stage where in order to sustain in the long-term, the company had to grow hard, if not fall by the way side. In addition, the measures like increasing the capacity of oil reserves, entering into strategic partnerships with companies abroad and augmenting its recovery levels were also taken up simultaneously. The targets for increasing the oil reserves is 12 billion tonnes by 2020 as against 5 billion now. With regard to enhancing its recovery levels the target set is 40% as against 26% now. For this fiscal the target for crude oil production is set at 26.39 million tonnes as against 26 million tonnes the previous year.

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