India

India's refiners built years of import economics on a wide discount for Russian crude delivered to their own ports; on 7 July that discount stood above $10 a barrel below Brent, worth pursuing despite the compliance risk of buying sanctioned-adjacent cargoes .

By 29 July a single unnamed-sources wire, the only support for that week's read, put the delivered-India discount at just $1-2, crediting the shift to Indian buyers themselves growing more willing to take on Hormuz-related risk rather than to any change in the crude's loading-point price . No comparable loading-point figure accompanied that report, so how much of India's saving has actually narrowed remains unconfirmed.

India's refiners have depended on successive US Treasury general licences to keep buying discounted crude without falling foul of sanctions; each lapse without a named successor forces Indian buyers to weigh legal exposure against price. A US Treasury action on 28 May named Indian commercial counterparties in Chennai for the first time in its Iran-crude enforcement series, mapping the end-buyer chain rather than only transit intermediaries and putting Indian firms directly inside the sanctions net .

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on 5 June that Washington wants to end Russian oil waivers 'as soon as we possibly can', with no confirmed replacement ahead of the 17 June expiry of GL 134C.

Oracle terminated 12,000 of its 30,000 India-based staff via a 6am email on 31 March 2026, a 40% contraction, the largest single-country AI-attributed tech layoff outside the US; none of the cuts appeared in Oracle's US WARN Act filings .

India's own IT majors complicated that picture. TCS shed 19,271 staff year-on-year by 9 July even as profit and revenue grew, HCLTech posted its sharpest quarterly headcount fall in five quarters by 13 July, and Wipro's zero-fresher pledge for FY27 coincided with a net headcount rise of 888, evidence the sector's AI-era contraction is uneven rather than uniform .