• Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar participated in the BRICS Foreign Ministers meeting held in Cape Town.

• Senior officials from more than a dozen countries, including Saudi Arabia and Iran, were in talks on forging closer links with the BRICS bloc of major emerging economies.

• BRICS, which now consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, is considering expanding its membership, and a growing number of countries have expressed interest in joining.

• Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Comoros, Gabon, and Kazakhstan all sent representatives to Cape Town for ‘Friends of BRICS’ talks. Egypt, Argentina, Bangladesh, Guinea-Bissau and Indonesia participated virtually.

• Jaishankar said the expansion of the BRICS bloc is still a work in progress and members of the five-nation grouping are approaching the idea with a positive intent and an open mind.

The BRICS nations

• The BRICS nations or Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa form the five 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 BRICS represent 41 per cent of the world population, 29 per cent of the global surface area and account for over 24 per cent of the global GDP.

• 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 2014, the BRICS nations established the New Development Bank (NDB). It has an initial authorised capital of $100 billion and initial subscribed capital of $50 billion of which $10 billion is paid-in capital.

Manorama Yearbook app is now available on Google Play Store and iOS App Store