By South China Morning Post | Created at 2026-09-09 12:31:48 | Updated at 2026-09-09 13:24:57
54 minutes ago
When leaders of the Brics group of emerging economies meet in New Delhi on September 12-13, India will confront an awkward paradox: the grouping has never been bigger or harder to make coherent.
What informally began as a four-member bloc comprising Brazil, Russia, India and China in 2006
has expanded into a grouping spanning Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. Its members include major energy exporters, manufacturing powers, emerging economies and countries with sharply different relationships with Washington and Beijing. That makes Brics a more credible voice for the Global South.
It also makes consensus much harder. For India, the Delhi summit is therefore less a test of whether Brics can become an alternative to the Western-led order than whether it can turn its diversity into something useful. The answer will depend heavily on how New Delhi manages its most obvious contradiction: China.
India wants Brics to give emerging economies greater influence over global institutions and reduce their vulnerability to Western-dominated financial systems. However, it has no interest in replacing dependence on the US dollar with dependence on China. That tension will shape the summit’s biggest ambitions, particularly de-dollarisation, cross-border payments and supply chain cooperation.
A common Brics currency remains an attractive political slogan but a distant economic prospect. There is a more concrete economic prize at stake. The bloc accounts for around 40 per cent of global GDP and half of the world’s population. If Brics members can make national currency settlements easier, connect payment systems and reduce transaction costs, an Indian exporter could potentially receive payment from a Brazilian, Emirati or Indonesian buyer without routing every transaction through dollar-based intermediaries.
Such linkages could give companies alternatives when geopolitical shocks disrupt established routes. That makes Brics economically relevant even without a common currency or a break with the US dollar. The bigger opportunity for India is to turn the grouping into a network that makes trade, investment and payments easier among its members.
