BRICS is bigger than the G7. Now India must turn economic weight into global authority

Twenty years ago, BRICS was a bond salesman's acronym. This week it becomes something else: a grouping of eleven members and ten partners — twenty-one countries in all — that has already overtaken the G7 on the measure that matters most to the developing world. Adjusted for purchasing power, BRICS+ now accounts for roughly 41 per cent of global output against the G7's 28 per cent, a crossover that occurred in 2018 and has widened every year since.

Honesty requires the qualifier. In nominal dollars the G7 remains the larger bloc — about $47 trillion to BRICS+'s $33 trillion — and on merchandise exports BRICS+ has closed a 34-point gap to roughly five points without yet overtaking. But the direction is unambiguous, and so is the growth arithmetic: BRICS averaged 3.4 per cent growth in 2025 against the G7's 1.2 per cent, with India, at 6.4 per cent in 2026, once again the fastest-growing major economy on earth.

That is the ledger India inherited when it took the chair on 1 January. The question its chairship has been quietly answering is whether that ledger can be converted into something more durable than a statistic.

An acronym rebuilt from the inside

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's most elegant move as chair was semantic. India's theme — Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability — is the acronym itself, re-read. It is a small thing that says a large one: that BRICS's identity should be defined by what it builds, not by what it opposes.

This matters because the bloc's founding premise, easily forgotten in the current mood, was practical cooperation for growth and development, engagement with multilateral development banks, and reform of global governance — explicitly not opposition to any country or group. India has spent nine months restoring that emphasis.

The four pillars structure everything. Resilience covers health, agriculture, food, energy, disaster risk reduction and supply chains. Innovation covers startups, MSMEs, science, technology, research, digital public infrastructure and artificial intelligence. Cooperation covers multilateralism and the reform of global institutions. Sustainability covers clean energy, climate adaptation, nature-based solutions and sustainable consumption.

Beneath the architecture sits an extraordinary volume of work: by the Ministry of External Affairs' count, more than 350 meetings and high-level engagements in over 25 Indian cities, spanning political and security, economic and financial, and people-to-people tracks. Ministerial declarations and outcome documents have emerged across nearly every vertical — a rate of consensus that would be respectable in a bloc half this size and this diverse.

What India is actually offering

India's contribution is not rhetorical. It is a working model.

Digital public infrastructure is India's most exportable asset. Aadhaar and the Unified Payments Interface demonstrated that population-scale digital identity and real-time payments can be built cheaply, publicly and inclusively — without surrendering the rails to a handful of global technology firms. For a Global South weighing dependency against sovereignty, that is not a slide deck; it is a proof of concept with a billion users. Through BRICS, India is offering the blueprint.

On artificial intelligence, India is arguing for governance before deployment. The 12th BRICS Communications Ministers' Meeting in August took up AI, cloud technologies, digital governance and resilient networks. New Delhi's framing is human-centric and ethical AI, equitable access for developing economies, and serious cybersecurity and data-protection safeguards. In a year when frontier AI capability is concentrating in two countries, an emerging-market coalition insisting on access is doing something genuinely useful.

On enterprise, India has proposed institutions, not communiqués. A BRICS Startup Innovation Fund to unlock cross-border venture capital. A BRICS Startup Innovation Network to connect founders, incubators and research ecosystems. A BRICS Science and Research Repository to pool capability in energy, health, advanced manufacturing and climate science. And on gender, the BRICS Women's Startup Contest and the WISE initiative — Women in Innovation, Science and Entrepreneurship — targeting the three barriers that actually bind: collaboration, capital and policy.

On finance, the rails of cross‑border settlement are being laid in the open. More than 500 institutional investors, finance ministers and business leaders commanding roughly $1 trillion in capital convene at the founding iBRICS Summit on the summit's margins, to discuss cross-border investment, non-dollar settlement and payment interoperability. Following the RBI Governor's confirmation of a BRICS payments task force, sessions will examine linking fast-payment systems such as UPI and Brazil's Pix, alongside better alignment of central bank digital currencies for settlement in national currencies. This is de-risking, not de-dollarisation theatre — and it is the single most consequential thing BRICS may do this decade.

On health, India has led by demonstration. The 16th BRICS Health Ministers' Declaration, adopted at Chandigarh in July after 26 technical consultations, committed members to universal health coverage, pandemic preparedness, digital health and traditional medicine. Delegates walked through India's own journey — the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, e-Sanjeevani, Tele-MANAS — and through the Ayush pavilions and FSSAI's Eat Right India exhibits. Two new priorities were India's own additions: a BRICS Mission for Healthy Lifestyle, and the promotion of mental wellness. This is Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam rendered as policy rather than poetry.

The test, not the triumph

None of this dissolves the hard part. The Foreign Ministers' meeting in May produced a Chair's Statement rather than a fully consensual joint declaration, and recorded plainly that members held "differing views" on West Asia. Twenty-one countries with divergent alignments cannot be expected to speak with one voice on war.

That reality has sharpened since. The US–Iran conflict has placed India in the chair's most uncomfortable seat: Tehran has urged New Delhi to marshal a common BRICS position against American military action, and President Masoud Pezeshkian pressed the case directly with Mr Modi in Bishkek on 31 August, asking India to use its unusual breadth of relationships to force a return to dialogue. India's own energy security and inflation outlook hang on the answer.

Here is where India's much-discussed strategic autonomy stops being a doctrine and becomes a job. BRICS is the only table on earth where India sits with China and Russia while keeping its partnerships with the United States, Europe and Japan intact. The convening power that comes with that position is real — but it is spent, not banked. If India can hold a fractious room together, protect its own interests, and still produce a summit declaration with substance in it, the chairship will have proved something the GDP tables cannot.

Geopolitics must not be allowed to devour geoeconomics. A grouping representing nearly

half of humanity, over 40 per cent of global output by purchasing power, close to 30 per cent of oil production and a commanding share of critical minerals has better uses for its energy than one-upmanship. Counterterrorism — where India has pushed hardest, at Bishkek and through the BRICS National Security Advisers' review of the counter-terrorism and ICT-security working groups — is the clearest case. Terrorist networks adopt new technology faster than states regulate it. No country outruns that alone.

India's wager, in the end, is a simple one: that legitimacy in the twenty-first century will accrue to whoever delivers. Not to the bloc that issues the sternest statement, but to the one that gets identity systems working, payments settling, medicines shipping, founders funded and grids greened.

On 12 September, India will chair a grouping that has finally grown larger than the club that has run the world for fifty years. Turning that size into authority — patiently, institution by institution, without asking anyone to choose sides — is the most ambitious thing New Delhi has attempted on the world stage. It is also, on the evidence of the last nine months, the thing it is best equipped to do.