BRICS@20: India’s vision for a wider world

As leaders of the BRICS nations gather in New Delhi, the summit assumes significance far beyond the conference halls. At a time when global power equations are shifting and multilateral institutions face growing challenges, BRICS represents an evolving effort to reshape the international order. The summit offers India an opportunity to strengthen cooperation among emerging economies, address shared challenges and assert its vision of a more balanced and inclusive global system

The story of BRICS over the last two decades is, in essence, the story of the redistribution of global economic and political weight — away from a narrow, post-1945 core and towards a wider, more representative table. That redistribution reaches a symbolic culmination this month, as New Delhi hosts the eighteenth BRICS Summit at Bharat Mandapam on September 12 and 13, under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.” It marks twenty years since the idea of institutionalised BRICS cooperation was first floated, and it marks the fourth occasion.

It is worth recalling how modest the beginnings were. In September 2006, foreign ministers of Brazil, Russia, India and China met on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. BRICS today has 11 members and 10 partner countries spanning Latin America, Africa, the Gulf, Southeast Asia and Central Asia. This is no longer an acronym of convenience but arguably the most representative grouping the Global South has produced.

India assumed this fourth Chairship on January 1, 2026, and has run it at a scale that few outside the diplomatic community have fully registered. The theme - drawn from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s articulation of “Humanity First” and a people-centric approach to multilateral engagement - has been operationalised across thirty-five ministerial and heads-of-agency tracks and roughly a hundred working and sub-working groups. More than 350 meetings have already been held across nearly thirty Indian cities, from Chandigarh to Kochi and Bhopal to Nagpur, making the Chairship a genuinely whole-of-nation exercise rather than a Delhi-centric one. The engagement has also travelled well beyond foreign ministries: Supreme Audit Institutions, Supreme Judicial Authorities, the BRICS Business Council, the BRICS Women’s Business Alliance, the Think Tanks Council and the Civil BRICS Council have all been drawn into a process that India has deliberately widened beyond traditional diplomatic channels.

Underneath the architecture, the substantive work has been organised around four pillars, and it is here that the Chairship’s claim to seriousness rests on outcomes rather than atmospherics. Under Resilience, ministers of health, agriculture, energy, environment and disaster management converged on a single logic: treat food, health, energy and supply-chain shocks as connected risks rather than isolated crises, and build shared institutional capacity to absorb them before they cascade across borders. That logic produced institutionalised cooperation on traditional medicine and mental wellness, a dedicated early-warning mechanism for infectious disease outbreaks, the BRICS Agriculture Research Platform and a Digital Agriculture Network intended to shield farmer livelihoods from climate volatility, and - on the energy and logistics side — Smart Grid principles paired with a Logistics Supply-Chain Cooperation Framework designed to de-risk cross-border trade dependencies.

Under Innovation, industry, science-and-technology and ICT ministers moved the grouping towards shared cross-border facilitating: the premise that an entrepreneur or researcher in any member state should be able to plug into common financing, incubation, research and payments infrastructure. The result is a proposed Startup Innovation Fund and Incubator Network, an MSME Cooperation Portal backed by a dedicated finance dialogue, and a Science and Research Repository that Indian officials have taken to calling, with some justification, one library of science for eleven countries. The most consequential outcome for India’s own digital diplomacy, however, is the Cross-Border Payment System pilot, in which India has offered its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) as the reference implementation for real-time, low-cost payment rails across the grouping — a quiet but significant projection of Indian digital public infrastructure onto a multilateral stage.

Under Cooperation, trade, justice and customs tracks reinforced a single underlying argument: that BRICS seeks to reform multilateralism from within existing rules rather than replace them, even as it builds the practical architecture for deeper economic integration among members.

Trade ministers reaffirmed their commitment to a WTO-centred trading system while advancing the Global Value Chains Action Plan for 2026-2030; customs heads reached in-principle agreement on a Mutual Administrative Assistance Agreement; and justice ministers adopted a declaration strengthening alternative dispute resolution mechanisms across the grouping. This is a chairship, notably, that has resisted the temptation to frame BRICS as a rival architecture to existing institutions, choosing the more patient instead - and arguably more durable - language of reform from within.

Under Sustainability, environment, energy and industry ministers embedded community and traditional knowledge into formal climate policy, effectively turning India’s own Mission LiFE ethos into a multilateral agenda. This included new Principles for People-Centric Climate Resilience built on indigenous adaptation knowledge, a Solar PV Cooperation Roadmap that extends India’s International Solar Alliance leadership into the BRICS framework, fresh frameworks on forest-fire preparedness and sustainable lifestyles, and - most significant for the Global South - stronger initiatives of climate financing aimed squarely at the financing gap that has stalled climate action across developing economies.

At its core, New Delhi’s participation in the grouping reflects a pursuit of strategic autonomy. It is within this grouping that India has found room to pursue partnerships, from energy security to digital payments to climate finance, on terms that reflect its own priorities and its own pace, while remaining anchored to a rules-based order. Herein lies the true import of the current Chairship: a clear manifestation of India’s practised diplomatic posture - balanced engagement across varied global platforms, advancing broader inclusivity alongside concrete domestic imperatives, while leveraging venues like BRICS to construct the resilient, self-reliant, and cooperative systems required for its long-term trajectory. Twenty years after that first ministerial huddle in New York, the leaders converging on New Delhi are, in that sense, gathering around a table that India has helped make wider, and one at which it has unmistakably found its own voice.

Harsh Vardhan Shringla, Member of Parliament and former Foreign Secretary of India; Views presented are personal.