India, while acknowledging its objections to Nepal’s Constitution, has said it has nothing to do with the shortages, which became so severe on Wednesday that Nepal decided to prohibit private cars from getting gas so there would be enough for emergency vehicles.

“The fuel crisis is deepening,” Gopal Bahadur Khadka, managing director of the Nepal Oil Corporation, a state-run company, said Tuesday. “Given the situation, we have very limited choices.” Nepal imports all of its fuel from India.

Whether they amount to a blockade or not, India’s orders have contributed to a drastic reduction in the number of trucks crossing the border, interviews with border officials indicate, and the imposition of exhaustive security checks coincides with the onset of Nepal’s fuel crisis.

Some border crossings are facing obstructions of a different sort. Nepali protesters from the Madhesi community have staged sit-ins at at least two major crossings, blocking those routes to goods since last week, officials said. Since August, more than 40 people, most from the Madhesi and ethnic Tharu communities, who live in southern and western Nepal, have been killed in protests over the Constitution. They argued that the new boundaries of several states would dilute their political voice.

But Sishir Dhungana, the director general of customs in Nepal, said that while two of the crossings were high-traffic trade routes, they accounted for fewer than half of the roughly 2,000 trucks that usually cross the border daily, and at several border checkpoints where there are no sit-ins, trucks are still not crossing into Nepal.