- India
- Feb 05
- Sreesha V.M
India joins BRICS Centre for Industrial Competencies (BCIC)
India joined the BRICS Centre for Industrial Competencies (BCIC) on February 4.
What is BCIC?
• UNIDO is a specialised United Nations agency with a unique mandate to promote inclusive and sustainable industrial development. It supports developing countries and emerging economies in building and transforming their industries.
• Requested and supported by the BRICS Plus countries, which collectively represent more than 40 per cent of the world’s population and more than 35 per cent of global GDP, the BCIC embodies these nations’ shared commitment to combining their efforts and resources to foster inclusive and sustainable industrial development.
• It is a platform for knowledge and technology exchange and through it UNIDO will help all partner countries to benefit from Industry 4.0, digitalisation and innovation.
• The BCIC is a one-stop networking hub for manufacturing companies in BRICS countries, helping them transition into ‘Factories of the Future’, expand internationally, and adopt sustainable practices.
• Its vision is to become the BRICS-driven technology marketplace for small and medium-sized enterprises, promote market access and business internationalisation, and provide scalable solutions which can be adopted throughout BRICS and other partner countries.
• The initiative is poised to catalyse new industrial capabilities and elevate the global competitiveness of BRICS economies.
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.
• 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.)