Iran was India's seventh-largest supplier of crude oil for the first nine months of the financial year that began April 1, slipping from third position after U.S. and European sanctions spurred India's refiners to cut their imports from the Persian Gulf country and expand procurement from other countries.
Iran was India 's seventh-largest supplier of crude oil for the first nine months of the financial year that began April 1, slipping from third position after U.S. and European sanctions spurred India 's refiners to cut their imports from the Persian Gulf country and expand procurement from other countries.

India usually doesn't make public the amount of crude it imports from individual countries, but junior oil minister Panabaaka Lakshmi provided the data as a written reply on Friday to lawmakers who requested the information in the lower house of the parliament.

Iran supplied 9.7 million tons of crude to India in the nine-month period. While the government didn't provide comparative figures for April-December of the last financial year, it said that for the full year ended March 31, 2012 , Iran was India 's third-largest supplier of crude.

Sanctions imposed by the U.S. and European Union have cut off the payment route for Iran 's crude supplies. Since India can't deposit dollars or euros to any foreign bank for the importing of Iranian crude, payment has been restricted to rupee deposits in Indian banks, which Iran can use to buy goods in India . So far, Iran has found it difficult to find enough goods to buy with its rupee payments.

Refiners are also getting cagey about importing from Iran .

P.P. Upadhya, managing director of Mangalore Refinery & Petrochemicals Ltd., India 's largest importer of Iranian crude, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that they might be forced to stop oil imports from the Persian Gulf nation if it can't renew the insurance on its refinery.

Local insurers have been reluctant to take the risk of providing insurance to refineries processing Iranian crude, as they are mainly dependent on reinsurance in overseas markets to hedge their insurance risk. Global reinsurers are staying away due to Western sanctions on Iran-related financial transactions.

For the April-December period, Saudi Arabia retained its position as India's main crude supplier, selling 24.8 million tons, followed by Iraq at 17.2 million tons, Venezuela at 15.1 million tons, Kuwait at 13.2 million tons, United Arab Emirates at 11.4 million tons and Nigeria at 9.9 million tons.

India 's total oil imports were 134 million tons over April-December, valued at $104.54 billion.

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