At its recent annual ministerial meeting in Paris last week, the International Energy Agency (IEA) welcomed the progress being made on India’s request for full membership of the organisation. As of now, India is an associate member of the Paris-based agency, which is a leading intergovernmental body that works on energy security, global energy policy, and, now increasingly, on climate change and energy transitions. But India’s request for membership is not straightforward. It would require IEA to amend its founding legal framework which restricts membership only to OECD countries. We explain. IEA was created in 1974 as one of the responses to the global oil crisis, triggered by the decision of the major Arab oil producing countries to impose an embargo on oil supplies to countries that were seen to be supporting Israel during the Yom Kippur War the previous year. The embargo had led to unprecedented rise in oil prices and fuel scarcity. The crisis exposed the vulnerability of major industrial countries, which also happened to be the biggest consumers of oil. These countries, …