UNDER R.S. Sharma's stewardship the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has made significant strides on several fronts besides consolidating its stature as an exploration and production (E&P) company. In the nine-month period ending December 2007, the company made 19 discoveries of hydrocarbon reserves. Sharma took over as the regular Chairman and Managing Director (CMD) in July 2007. He was earlier Director (Finance) and was holding additional charge as CMD since May 2006. He has been on the Board of the corporation from March 2002 and has built up the company's fortunes since then. He streamlined the monetary support to ONGC Videsh Limited. He also turned round the financial state of another subsidiary, Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Limited. Excerpts from his emailed replies to a set of questions: After more than a decade, the ONGC established last year more recoverable reserves than it has produced. The reserve to production ratio is greater than one. Congratulations to you on this. How do you plan to publicise this achievement and put into production these reserves? Thank you for the compliments. The ONGC recorded in-place reserves accretion [in ONGC-operated areas] of 169.52 million tonnes of oil equivalent [MTOE], the highest in 11 years after 1995-96. It has also crossed the 150 MTOE mark for the ninth time in its 51 years of operation. We have continued to maintain the pace and consistency of the success in our exploration this fiscal. In the nine-month period ending December 2007, the ONGC made 19 discoveries [nine from new prospects and five from new pools]. Quantification of these discoveries will be declared after April. For converting discoveries into producing assets, the ONGC has chalked out aggressive plans. We are optimistic about being able to reduce substantially the "discovery-to-first-oil' period. The ONGC has set a Capex [capital expenditure] outlay of $16 billion [Rs.75,984 crore] in the Eleventh Plan. It is envisaging production of over 140 million tonnes of crude oil during the Plan period [an increase of 10 mt over the Tenth Plan] and 112 billion cubic metres [BCM] of natural gas. Coming to the publicity part, we are open and transparent in sharing our successes as well as our failures with the media. India was promised a block in Sakhalin-III. Are we likely to get it? OVL has been operating in Sakhalin-I since 2001. It has acquired a 20 per cent participating interest in the project for an investment of $1.7 billion