New Delhi, Sept. 9 -- India's hosting of the BRICS Summit in New Delhi on September 12-13 comes at an important moment for a grouping whose economic weight has grown much faster than its internal cohesion. Expanded to 11 members and accompanied by 10 partner countries, BRICS now represents nearly half the world's population and around 40 per cent of global GDP in purchasing power parity terms. Under the theme "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability", India has rightly sought to make its chairship practical and development-oriented. More than 350 meetings and high-level engagements have preceded the summit, while trade ministers have worked towards a BRICS Economic Partnership Strategy for 2030, resilient global value chains and improved access to finance for smaller businesses. Yet the real test of economic cooperation is not the number of declarations produced but whether commerce becomes broader, more balanced and mutually beneficial. For India, the trade numbers reveal precisely why this must be central to the summit.
India's merchandise trade with its BRICS partners more than doubled from $203.1 billion in FY21 to $417.5 billion in FY26. But the headline conceals a striking asymmetry. Exports increased from $64.3 billion to $95.7 billion, while imports surged from $138.8 billion to $321.8 billion, pushing the deficit from $74.5 billion to $226.1 billion. BRICS countries now supply 41.5 per cent of India's merchandise imports but absorb only 21.7 per cent of its exports. The concentration is equally revealing. China supplied $131.6 billion worth of goods in FY26 against Indian exports of $19.5 billion, leaving a deficit exceeding $112 billion. Russia's rise as an energy supplier produced another gap of more than $50 billion, while the UAE, despite being India's largest BRICS export destination, also recorded a sizeable surplus in its trade with India. China, Russia and the UAE together dominate India's BRICS imports. Some of this imbalance is structural: India needs crude oil, machinery, electronics, industrial inputs and commodities. A deficit is therefore not inherently evidence of unhealthy trade. But persistent dependence on a narrow group of suppliers, without comparable export access, creates economic vulnerabilities that a grouping committed to resilience should address.
New Delhi should consequently use its BRICS chairship to push the conversation beyond increasing trade volumes to improving their quality. Indian pharmaceuticals, agricultural products, engineering goods, services and higher-value manufactured products continue to encounter market-access and non-tariff obstacles in important economies. Removing such barriers, improving customs procedures, facilitating payments, strengthening logistics and creating opportunities for MSMEs would make intra-BRICS commerce more credible. India should simultaneously diversify supply chains rather than mistake deeper BRICS integration for greater dependence on China. BRICS need not become either an anti-Western economic bloc or merely a platform for geopolitical signalling. Its strength lies in allowing countries with very different interests to cooperate where interests converge. India can give that principle economic substance. A grouping claiming a larger voice in global governance must demonstrate that cooperation produces measurable benefits among its own members. For India, success in New Delhi should therefore be judged not simply by another ambitious declaration, but by whether BRICS begins moving from bigger trade towards fairer, more resilient and genuinely reciprocal trade.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.