Whichever way you turn, Subir Raha’s image is vivid in India. After television and newspapers, the visage of the chairman of the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, India’s largest and most profitable business, now stares imposingly from hoardings sponsored by Teacher’s, a whisky franchise. For an official at a state-owned business, his profile is, for sure, large and rare. Behind the posters, though, is a leader battling on many fronts.

A powerful personality, Mr Raha has stood up to his boss, the media-savvy petroleum minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar, in an argument over government interference in the management of ONGC, in which the state owns a 74 per cent stake. He is under pressure to improve a dismal record of domestic exploration and to squeeze greater productivity from ONGC’s existing fields in Indian waters. Most important, though, he has led the overseas search for oil in a strategy to secure India’s energy security as consumers and factories at home guzzle energy in an economy powering ahead at an annual rate of between 7 and 8 per cent.