India, Sept. 11 -- The expansion of BRICS since 2023, somewhat haphazard and lacking clear criteria, has enhanced its political outreach and given it a greater global focus. The New Development Bank (NDB), created collectively by the original five BRICS members in 2015, has also expanded, but there is no automaticity in countries joining BRICS also joining NDB, or vice versa. The question is whether BRICS is expanding too fast for NDB to acquire the economic scale and internal capacity needed to support its increasingly ambitious agenda.

It seems that BRICS is trying to enable NDB to become more responsive to a wider Global South constituency. NDB originally had five shareholders, each with an equal share of the subscribed capital. It su...