Assessing BRICS ahead of the 2026 summit

The eighteenth BRICS Summit will take place on September 12 and 13, 2026, in New Delhi at the Bharat Mandapam. This is the fourth time India has been in charge of the BRICS leadership position, having done so in 2012, 2016, and 2021. The topic for this summit will be “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation, and Sustainability.” The mere presence of important participants from all around the world at this summit reveals how far things have come since 2001, when Jim O’Neill coined the term.

Who is actually in the room?

BRICS today operates at two levels of engagement. Eleven full members comprise Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Indonesia. In addition to these full members are ten associate member countries, a new category established at the Kazan summit in 2024 and made up of Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. These twenty-one nations span different regions like South America, Europe, Asia, Middle East and Africa.

India has also invited “outreach” guests to the New Delhi summit, a practice every BRICS host has followed since South Africa first invited African leaders to the 2013 Durban summit. The proposed countries are Bahrain, Bangladesh, Burundi, Philippines and Uruguay.

India in leadership role

Chairing BRICS for a fourth time and after the recent presidency of G20, India could be pushing a cross-border payment framework by linking national systems for local-currency settlement. The Reserve Bank of India has floated a mechanism linking India’s e-Rupee with China’s digital yuan, Brazil’s DREX and the UAE’s CBDC.

India remains the fastest-growing large economy among BRICS members, at 7.7 percent in 2025 and a projected 6.4 percent in 2026, against China’s 5 percent in 2025 and 4.6 percent in 2026. That growth differential would add to economic influence inside a grouping where China dominates by sheer economic size.

1.Associate Professor at Atal Bihari Vajpayee School of Management and Entrepreneurship, Jawaharlal Nehru University

2. Founder and CEO, EGROW Foundation

Strength of BRICS

The aggregated economic strength of BRICS is immense. First, on GDP, at market exchange rates, the eleven members are roughly level with the United States and larger than the EU. Second, and most important for a trading-bloc argument, merchandise trade share is significant with around a quarter of world exports. However, Intra-BRICS trade, meaning that members

trade with each other rather than with the outside world, was still only about five percent of global trade as of May 2026. That gap is a sign that BRICS remains a loose trading network today rather than an integrated trading bloc in the EU sense. Third, given the size of population, there is a need to strengthen MSMEs in these countries.

Table 1: BRICS-11, EU, and the US

Can the BRICS currency fly?

There is no consensus on a common BRICS currency, a position restated explicitly at the 2025 Rio summit. What is real, and worth tracking separately, is de-dollarisation through local-currency settlement.

A major reserve currency requires deep, liquid and convertible capital markets, supported by institutions capable of providing liquidity in periods of financial stress. These are conditions the eurozone struggled to meet even with a genuine monetary union, and a grouping with no common central bank cannot have a common currency. The more plausible outcome, over five to ten years, is an assorted set of bilateral settlement systems and CBDC interoperability that facilitates local currency trade, reducing dollar dependence.

How will India benefit?

China accounts for more than half of the bloc’s GDP at 18.5 trillion dollars according to the IMF. Against that backdrop, is there still something concrete for India, apart from good-will?

Most importantly, BRICS, alongside the Quad, the G20 and bilateral arrangements, gives India another institutional platform for a democratic consensus-based dialogue even without expecting to dominate the agenda inside the grouping. India could benefit from much needed reforms in global governance, including the IMF quota formula and greater representation of EME’s, in multilateral agencies, resilient supply chains, digital trade, AI and energy security.

Is this the shape of a potential multipolar world?

The European Union is a single, contiguous, legally integrated market with one currency, one external tariff and one trade negotiator. The United States is a single sovereign state. In sharp contrast, BRICS-11, is a global south coalition spread across four continents, containing democracies and one-party states, oil exporters and importers, and members with open disputes with each other. If the larger twenty-one-country group deepens its payment infrastructure, local-currency settlement and development financing over the next five to ten years, then the world would witness an emergence of another political pole, fragmenting away from a single dominant currency and trading system, towards other competing centres of gravity.

Way Forward

BRICS today has no founding treaty, no permanent secretariat comparable to NATO’s institutional structure, and no mutual-defence clause of any kind. A grouping this large and diverse, has the potential choosing, to layer a security dimension on top of its economic focus. Hopefully, in future, beyond trade and finance, BRICS could consider alliances in defence, sharing of human resources and strengthening skill centres in each member country.