BRICS at 20: What Has It Achieved, and What Should India Build Next?

When the leaders of the BRICS countries meet in New Delhi on September 12 and 13, the setting will carry some historical weight. Twenty years after Brazil, Russia, India and China first came together as BRIC, the grouping has grown into an 11-member forum representing almost half of the world's population and about 37 per cent of global GDP on a purchasing-power-parity basis. Its economic weight has moved sharply since the early 2000s, when the four original members accounted for about 23 per cent of global GDP compared with nearly 52 per cent for the G7. By 2024, the positions had substantially changed.

But the anniversary also invites a less flattering question: what has BRICS actually built?

The answer is more complicated than either its supporters or its critics sometimes suggest. BRICS has not replaced the Western-led financial system, created a common currency or emerged as a coherent geopolitical alliance. Yet dismissing it as a talking shop would also be inaccurate. Its most important achievement has been institutional.

The creation of the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement in 2014 gave the grouping something more durable than annual summit declarations. The NDB, in particular, became an attempt to give developing economies another source of infrastructure and development finance. India had pushed the idea of a BRICS development bank at the 2012 summit in New Delhi, and the proposal eventually became the NDB. By mid-2026, the bank had approved roughly $44 billion across 141 projects.

That achievement should nevertheless be kept in perspective. The NDB remains modest when compared with the scale of financing provided by established multilateral institutions. Carnegie has described it as undercapitalised, arguing that its future relevance will depend on whether BRICS members are willing to strengthen its capital base and allow it to mobilise more private investment. The bank's existence matters, but its real test is whether it can finance projects at the scale and speed that developing countries require.

The same distinction applies to BRICS' wider economic ambitions. Intra-BRICS trade has increased considerably over two decades, reaching around $1.17 trillion in 2024, according to analysis published by The Indian Express. Yet the enormous aggregate size of the grouping hides a basic weakness: its members have very different economic structures, levels of development and policy priorities. Average per-capita GDP remains far below that of the G7. BRICS is therefore powerful in aggregate, but it is not a club of equally wealthy countries pursuing a common economic model.

That diversity has become even more significant after the recent expansion. South Africa joined in 2010. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE joined in 2024, while Indonesia became a full member in January 2025. The expansion increased BRICS' demographic and economic reach, bringing in major energy producers, emerging markets and important economies from the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. It also made consensus considerably harder.

The problem is visible in the group's foreign-policy debates. China and Russia increasingly see BRICS as a means of reducing Western influence and challenging aspects of the US-led international system. India and Brazil have generally preferred a more flexible interpretation, treating the grouping as a platform for economic cooperation and reform of global institutions. The difference is not cosmetic. It concerns the basic question of what BRICS is supposed to become.

India has little reason to turn that difference into a confrontation. New Delhi's foreign policy has increasingly rested on working simultaneously with different centres of power. India is a member of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, while also participating in the Quad and maintaining a close strategic relationship with the United States and Europe. That approach is sometimes described as multi-alignment, but its underlying logic is simpler: India wants room to pursue its interests without becoming dependent on any single power centre. BRICS fits into that strategy precisely because it does not have to become an anti-Western organisation.

The temptation to define the grouping in those terms has grown as the debate over the dollar has intensified. Russia, facing Western sanctions, has strong incentives to develop alternatives to existing financial channels. China has promoted greater use of national currencies and alternative payment arrangements. There has also been repeated political discussion about a common BRICS currency. But a single currency was never an easy proposition. The economies represented in BRICS have different monetary systems, exchange-rate regimes, capital controls and financial priorities.

India's approach has consequently been more cautious. Rather than pursuing a supranational currency, New Delhi is pushing for better interoperability between payment systems and central-bank digital currencies. Reuters reported ahead of the Delhi summit that India is advocating closer integration of BRICS digital currencies to make cross-border payments faster and cheaper. The proposal is significant because it addresses an actual economic problem without requiring BRICS members to agree on a common monetary policy.

That is also a better description of what India should want from BRICS. The issue is not whether the dollar should suddenly disappear from international trade. It will not. The dollar still accounted for 57.13 per cent of global central-bank reserves in the first quarter of 2026. Even Russia has recently said it is not seeking formal "de-dollarisation" and is open to different payment mechanisms. The more realistic objective is to give businesses in emerging economies additional ways to settle legitimate trade without unnecessary costs and dependence on a single financial channel.

India's experience with UPI gives it an unusual advantage in this discussion. The country's digital payments architecture has demonstrated how public digital infrastructure can change the way people and businesses transact. Exporting that experience through interoperable systems could become a much more meaningful BRICS achievement than another declaration about the decline of Western financial power.

The same principle applies to development finance. If BRICS wants to demonstrate that a more representative global economic order is possible, the New Development Bank is the institution through which it can do so. India should use its presidency to push for stronger lending capacity, more local-currency financing and greater participation from private investors. The need is particularly visible in climate finance. Developing countries require enormous investment to expand renewable energy while also decarbonising industries such as steel, cement and chemicals, where emissions cannot be eliminated simply by replacing coal-fired power with solar panels. A recent Financial Express analysis argues that the NDB could occupy a useful position here by shifting greater attention towards transition finance.

There is another area where the future of BRICS could be more consequential than its geopolitical rhetoric: technology.

The countries now inside BRICS contain large technology markets, major research institutions, manufacturing capabilities, pharmaceutical industries and growing pools of scientific talent. India can use its presidency to build cooperation around artificial intelligence, digital public infrastructure, cybersecurity, biotechnology and advanced manufacturing. That would give the grouping a practical agenda that directly affects economic growth.

For Education Post, this dimension deserves particular attention. The long-term strength of emerging economies will depend less on the number of declarations their governments sign than on what happens inside their universities, laboratories and workplaces. A BRICS research network linking universities and research institutions could support joint work in climate science, public health, agriculture, artificial intelligence and advanced materials. A skills initiative could connect students and early-career researchers across member states. Such programmes would also give BRICS a constituency beyond governments.

This is where India's leadership could become distinctive.

The grouping already talks about reforming global institutions, including the IMF, World Bank and United Nations. Those demands remain relevant because the distribution of economic power has changed considerably since those institutions were created. But institutional reform is difficult and often takes years. BRICS can make its case more effectively if it combines that diplomatic argument with working alternatives in areas where cooperation is possible.

There is also a strategic reason for India to resist turning BRICS into an anti-Western bloc. The expanded grouping contains countries that have very different relationships with the United States and Europe. The UAE and Saudi Arabia maintain extensive economic links with Western economies. Brazil has traditionally favoured a more autonomous foreign policy without abandoning its engagement with Western institutions. India itself has deepened strategic cooperation with Washington even as it remains part of BRICS. An organisation built around opposition to the West would therefore contain its own contradiction.

The recent tensions involving Iran and the UAE make the problem even clearer. Both are BRICS members but have been on opposing sides of a serious regional confrontation. The BRICS foreign ministers' meeting in New Delhi in May 2026 failed to produce a joint declaration, exposing the difficulty of reaching consensus among an expanded membership. Reuters has also reported that the current Middle East conflict is testing the group's ability to maintain unity as India prepares to host the leaders' summit.

This does not necessarily make BRICS weaker. It may simply reveal what the organisation should realistically be. BRICS is unlikely to become another European Union, with common institutions and a unified foreign policy. Nor does it need to. Its value may lie precisely in bringing together countries that disagree on some major questions but still have reasons to cooperate on development, trade, finance, technology, health and climate.

India should therefore judge the Delhi summit by a relatively simple standard: whether the grouping can produce a few concrete projects that survive after the leaders leave.

A stronger NDB would matter. Progress on cross-border digital payments would matter. Better coordination on supply chains, critical minerals and food and energy security would matter. Research and technology partnerships would matter. A serious common position on reforming global financial institutions would matter.

Another declaration warning against Western dominance would matter much less. The changing global order does not require another rigid bloc. The world already has enough of those. What it lacks is sufficient cooperation among countries whose interests overlap without being identical.

That gives India a useful role. It can keep BRICS focused on the original complaint that brought its members together — that global institutions have not kept pace with changes in economic and political power — while steering the group away from the idea that correcting that imbalance requires replacing one dominant bloc with another.

The success of India's BRICS presidency, then, should not be measured by how sharply New Delhi positions the grouping against Washington or Brussels. It should be measured by whether India can persuade very different countries to build institutions that make finance cheaper, trade easier, research more connected and development more resilient.

BRICS has already demonstrated that emerging economies can create institutions of their own. Its next test is harder: whether those institutions can become useful enough to shape the choices available to the wider Global South.

If India can move the grouping in that direction, BRICS will have a more durable purpose than simply confronting the West. It will be helping to build a global order in which developing countries have more options, greater negotiating power and a larger role in deciding how the next phase of globalisation works. That would be a far more consequential achievement for India to pursue in New Delhi.