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NEW DELHI, Jan 7 (AFP) - India has a huge potential of seven billion tonnes of oil or gas on its east coast, a top official said Tuesday.

"After our survey, we worked out that there was seven billion tonnes of oil or gas on the east coast," said Avinash Chandra, head of the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH), a regulatory body set up by the oil ministry.

He said recent findings by India's largest private sector group, Reliance, also found that the country's east coast has massive untapped potential.

In October Reliance announced India's biggest gas discovery in nearly three decades and one of the world's largest gas discoveries in 2001.

The company discovered seven trillion cubic feet, equivalent to about 1.2 billion barrels of crude oil in eastern India.

"India's oil potential will mark a paradigm shift in energy production worldwide," Chandra said.

He however ruled out the possibility of India becoming self-sufficient in the oil sector but added the oil deficit would be considerably plugged.

India currently imports 70 percent of its requirement of oil and petroleum products.

The projected requirement in India for 2002-2003 is 108 million tonnes of crude oil compared with production of 33 million tonnes and 55 million tonnes of natural gas against the production of 24 million tonnes.

"Being a robust economy, India's demand for oil is also increasing rapidly," Chandra said.

He said world oil demand was growing by 1.5 percent, but India's consumption was growing at more than six percent a year.

Chandra said the reserves were found in a seismic survey carried out in the mid-1990s after the organisation decided to explore oil under deep waters.

"We were spending 13.4 billion dollars on oil imports, but were not spending anything on surveying new areas," Chandra said.

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