PM Modi participates in 17th BRICS Summit in Brazil

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi participated in the 17th BRICS Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on July 6 & 7. 

• The leaders held productive discussions on various issues on the BRICS agenda, including reform of global governance, enhancing voice of the global south, peace and security, strengthening multilateralism, development issues and Artificial Intelligence. 

• PM Modi addressed the inaugural session on ‘Reform of Global Governance and Peace and Security’. 

• Later, he also addressed a session on ‘Strengthening Multilateral, Economic-Financial Affairs and Artificial Intelligence’. This session included participation by BRICS partners and invited countries.

• Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin skipped the summit. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi also didn’t attend the Summit.

• The BRICS leaders unveiled the ‘Rio de Janeiro Declaration’ that featured the grouping’s position on a number of pressing global challenges, including terrorism, the situation in West Asia, trade and tariff, and reform of global institutions such as the UN Security Council and the Bretton Woods Institutions. The Bretton Woods Institutions are the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

• They condemned the Pahalgam terror attack and echoed India’s position to pursue a “zero tolerance” approach towards terrorism and called for shunning double standards in countering the menace.

• The leaders also criticised the indiscriminate rising of tariffs. The proliferation of trade-restrictive actions, whether in the form of indiscriminate rising of tariffs and non-tariff measures, or protectionism under the guise of environmental objectives, threatens to further reduce global trade, disrupt global supply chains, and introduce uncertainty into international economic and trade activities, potentially exacerbating existing economic disparities and affecting prospects for global economic development. 

The BRICS nations

• The BRICS nations or Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa form the key pillars of south-south cooperation and are the representative voice of emerging markets and developing countries in the global forums such as the G20.

• The grouping has become a 11-nation body now with Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia joining it as new members.

• The acronym BRIC was first used in 2001 by Goldman Sachs in their Global Economics Paper, ‘The World Needs Better Economic BRICs’ on the basis of econometric analyses projecting that the four economies would individually and collectively occupy far greater economic space and would be amongst the world’s largest economies in the next 50 years or so.

• The leaders of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries met for the first time in St. Petersburg, Russia, on the margins of the G8 Outreach Summit in July 2006. Shortly afterwards, in September 2006, the group was formalised as BRIC during the First BRIC Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, which met on the sidelines of the General Debate of the UN Assembly in New York City.

• After a series of high level meetings, the first BRIC summit was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia on June 16, 2009.

• It was agreed to expand BRIC into BRICS with the inclusion of South Africa at the BRIC Foreign Ministers meeting in New York in September 2010. Accordingly, South Africa attended the third BRICS Summit in Sanya on April 14, 2011. 

• In 2015, the BRICS established the New Development Bank (NDB) with the purpose of mobilising resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in emerging markets and developing countries.

Expansion of BRICS

• BRICS leaders have left the door open to future enlargement as dozens more countries voiced interest in joining a grouping.

• Around 40 countries had shown interest in joining BRICS out of which 23 formally applied for the membership.

• In August 2023, the top BRICS leaders at the grouping’s summit in Johannesburg approved a proposal to admit six countries, including Argentina, into the bloc with effect from January 1, 2024. However, Argentina’s President Javier Milei announced withdrawing his country from becoming a member of the BRICS.

• The decision to expand the bloc is seen as an effort to reshape global governance while putting the voices of the Global South as a key priority area to advance the overall development agenda.

• Brazil assumed the presidency of BRICS on January 1, 2025.

• The BRICS has emerged as an influential grouping as it brings together 11 major emerging economies of the world, representing around 49.5 per cent of the global population, around 40 per cent of the global GDP and around 26 per cent of the global trade.

(The author is a trainer for Civil Services aspirants.)