Nearly 31 years later, India is expecting to get oil and gas production from a new basin Kutch Offshore starting 2017-18. Till now, only seven out of 26 sedimentary basins in India are under production. Cauvery basin was the last to come on stream in 1985.

India's flagship explorer ONGC is carrying out exploratory work in the Kutch Offshore basin and has so far discovered one trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas.

The work is in progress and we are trying to establish another 0.5 tcf of gas. Then it can be put into production. In a gas field, generally, recovery is more than 60%,Ajay Kumar Dwivedi, director (exploration) of ONGC, told FE.

The Kutch Offshore is a shallow water acreage where ONGC has reached the appraisal stage. By mid-2017, the PSU firm targets to complete the appraisal process and move on for development of the resources. In the Kutch Offshore sedimentary basin, ONGC has four blocks bagged under the New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP) auction regime, while another 700-800 square kilometre of nominated area is available for exploration and production activities.