Anti-fragility is not about building inefficiencies or excess inventories to manage market shocks, but about creating optionality and flexibility, Indian Oil Corporation chairman Arvinder Singh Sahney said.
Speaking during a session at the summit titled ‘Is 2026 The Year We Pivot From Efficiency To Anti-Fragility?’ on Saturday, Sahney and Akasa Air founder and CEO Vinay Dube discussed what anti-fragility means for their respective industries and how they are making their organisations resilient.
“Our job as people who are responsible for maintaining the energy lines of a country as big as India is that how I build optionality into the systems,” Sahney said. He cited multiple events in recent years-from the Ukraine war to the Iran conflict and Operation Sindoor-as challenges to the energy system. The test of an anti-fragile system, he said, lies in how it responds to disruptions and how much more robust, flexible and reliable it becomes after the challenges have faded.
Diversification of energy sources, including crude oil, LPG and natural gas, is crucial for building an anti-fragile system. “How I bring out different sources so that it gives me a flexibility in terms of hedging my sources of energy. How I secure my supply chains, transportation, the movement of petroleum products and crude from the sources to Indian shores-that is all I understand from anti- fragility,” Sahney said. “We have been working assiduously on these lines for building and ensuring that the energy is affordable and available at all times to all people.”
Dube of Akasa Air said building redundancies is core to the airline business. “Whether it’s redundancy of capital, or whether it’s redundancy of people… As an example, our ability to respond to new pilot rules allowed us to create and deliver network free of cancellations in this winter,” he said.
“Building in redundancies across multiple levels is what we do, and it hinges on extremely strong planning discipline, sensitivity analysis in our planning,” he said. “To be able to deliver this through ups and downs requires culture building.”
A culture of safety and service is important, he added. “But I think a little-known culture, particularly in aviation, allowing us to react to the ups and downs that the world throws at us is this employee-centric culture,” Dube said. “Because without an employee-centric culture, you’ll get a robotic response. With an employee-centric culture, you’ll get a spirited response.”
Dube said disciplined fleet management is critical for an airline. “We’re not opportunistic in saying, let’s send off or park these aircraft during down times,” he said. “It’s with this discipline that allows you to be both nimble but also keeps you on the path of the chosen strategy.”
Decentralisation of decision-making
Decentralisation of decision-making is important at Akasa, Dube said. “The most critical element is to decentralise the safety decision and do it in a manner that protects the decision maker and empowers that decision maker and makes them feel free to make that safety call in a very decentralised manner,” he said.
For Indian Oil, decision-making has to be both centralised and decentralised depending on the requirement, Sahney said. “The energy sourcing has to be a centralised function, but at the same time, disbursement of that energy to the general public has to be decentralised,” he said.
Since Indian Oil serves hundreds of thousands of customers every day, it is important that employees are empowered to take decisions to meet customer requirements, Sahney said.
Pursuit of alternative energy
Indian Oil, the nation’s largest fossil fuel refiner and retailer, is seriously committed to the energy transition, chairman Sahney said.
“This wave of transition that is coming up in terms of compressed biogas, ethanol, green hydrogen-these are all Godsend opportunities for the Indian economy,” Sahney said, citing their potential to reduce the country’s $135 billion annual oil import bill. Renewable energy, he said, offers immense possibilities and could be a game-changer for the Indian economy.
The 20% blending of ethanol in petrol is already weighing on demand for imported oil and represents a live example of import substitution, he said. Sustainable aviation fuel is another major opportunity, and Indian Oil is ready to meet that demand, he added.
