India chairs first BRICS health meeting of 2026

As BRICS Chair for 2026, India hosted the bloc's first Health Working Group meeting in New Delhi and proposed two fresh priority areas.

What happened

• The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare hosted the first BRICS Health Working Group (HWG) meeting of 2026 in New Delhi, with India in the chair as it holds the BRICS Chairship for 2026.
• Delegations from all nine member economies took part: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (the founding five) plus Egypt, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia (the newer members).
• The 2026 health agenda runs under the theme "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability," carried forward from the 2025 BRICS Summit hosted by Brazil in Rio de Janeiro.
• Union Health Secretary Punya Salila Srivastava proposed two new priority areas for the bloc: a BRICS Mission for Healthy Lifestyles and the Promotion of Mental Health and Wellness.
• The meeting reaffirmed continuing work on the BRICS TB Research Network and on evidence-based traditional medicine, signalling continuity with priorities set under earlier chairships.
• With the two additions, the HWG now organises its cooperation around nine priority areas spanning research, regulation, surveillance and digital health.

Background & context

BRICS is an intergovernmental grouping of major emerging economies that began as an informal coordination of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The label traces back to the term "BRIC," coined in 2001 by an economist to describe these four fast-growing economies; the countries first met as a formal grouping at leaders' level in 2009 in Yekaterinburg, Russia. South Africa joined in 2010, turning "BRIC" into "BRICS." The grouping has no founding treaty and no permanent secretariat or headquarters; it works through an annually rotating chairship, leaders' summits, and a web of ministerial and sectoral working groups — of which the Health Working Group is one.

The bloc expanded substantially from 1 January 2024, admitting new members and widening its geographic and demographic footprint. The members visible at this meeting — Egypt, Ethiopia, the UAE and Indonesia alongside the original five — reflect that enlarged composition. This expansion is the single most testable fact about contemporary BRICS, because it changes both the membership count and the regional balance of the group. The Health Working Group is the standing channel through which BRICS health ministries and officials coordinate; it reports up into the meeting of BRICS Health Ministers, which in turn feeds the leaders' summit. India hosting and chairing the first HWG meeting of the year is the operational opening of its 2026 chairship in the health domain, and the venue (New Delhi) and the chair (India) are the load-bearing facts.

India's health diplomacy inside BRICS has a recognisable signature: it consistently pushes tuberculosis elimination, digital health, and traditional, complementary and integrative medicine (TCIM) — areas where India runs large domestic programmes and can therefore lead by example. The new 2026 proposals on healthy lifestyles and mental health extend that pattern from communicable disease and systems toward the rising burden of non-communicable disease and behavioural health, which now drives a growing share of deaths across emerging economies.

It helps to see how the Health Working Group sits within the wider machinery of the grouping. BRICS cooperation is organised in three layers: at the top is the annual leaders' summit, hosted by the chair country; below it sit ministerial meetings across sectors such as health, finance, trade, agriculture and environment; and feeding those are technical working groups and senior-officials channels where the detailed agenda is actually built. The HWG is the health-sector engine of this pyramid: it is where member states' health officials negotiate the priority areas, review running networks like the TB Research Network, and prepare the deliverables that BRICS Health Ministers later endorse. Because the chairship rotates each year, the host country gets to propose new priority areas — which is exactly what India has done in 2026 by tabling the healthy-lifestyles mission and the mental-health track. This is the mechanism by which a single member can steer a leaderless, secretariat-less grouping: agenda-setting through the chair.

The expansion of BRICS also reshapes the health conversation. Bringing in Egypt, Ethiopia, the UAE and Indonesia adds large and varied health systems — a populous Southeast Asian archipelago, two African states with very different disease profiles, and a high-income Gulf economy. That widens both the problems the group must address (from infectious disease in lower-income members to lifestyle disease in wealthier ones) and the resources it can pool. It is this enlarged, more heterogeneous membership that makes India's twin 2026 proposals — one aimed at prevention of lifestyle disease, one at mental health — coherent as common ground across rich and poor members alike.

For Prelims

• What it is: the BRICS Health Working Group (HWG) — a standing sectoral working group of the BRICS grouping that coordinates health cooperation among member states.
• Who chairs in 2026: India holds the BRICS Chairship for 2026 and hosted the year's first HWG meeting in New Delhi.
• Members present (nine): Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, UAE, Indonesia.
• Founding five: Brazil, Russia, India, China (the original BRIC, formal leaders' summit from 2009) + South Africa (added 2010).
• 2026 theme: "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability" — carried over from the 2025 Rio de Janeiro Summit hosted by Brazil.
• Two new priority areas (proposed 2026): BRICS Mission for Healthy Lifestyles; Promotion of Mental Health and Wellness.
• Continuing focus: BRICS TB Research Network; evidence-based traditional medicine / TCIM.
• Nine HWG priority areas: TB research · regulatory cooperation · an integrated early-warning system · digital health architecture · healthy lifestyles · mental health · TCIM · diseases driven by social determinants · a network of national public health institutes.
• Structure: BRICS has no permanent secretariat, no headquarters and no founding charter; it runs on a rotating annual chairship and leaders' summits, with working groups like the HWG reporting up to the Health Ministers' meeting.
• Nodal authority (India side): Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, with the Union Health Secretary representing India at official level.

Why it matters

For India, chairing BRICS in 2026 is a platform to set the agenda across a grouping that now represents a very large share of the world's population and a rising share of global output. In health specifically, the working-group route lets India convert its domestic strengths into shared positions: a country that has scaled a national digital health stack, runs one of the world's largest TB-elimination drives, and formally recognises traditional systems of medicine can credibly lead BRICS partners on exactly those questions. Hosting the first meeting of the year sets the tone and the priorities the rest of the chairship will be measured against.

The two new proposals address a real and growing problem. As emerging economies grow richer and more urban, the disease burden shifts from infections toward non-communicable diseases — heart disease, diabetes, cancers — driven by diet, inactivity, tobacco and alcohol, alongside a rising and long-neglected burden of mental ill-health. A BRICS Mission for Healthy Lifestyles and a mental-health-and-wellness track push the bloc's cooperation toward prevention and behavioural health, complementing its older focus on tuberculosis, surveillance and access to medicines. For the Global South more broadly, BRICS health cooperation matters because it offers a venue — outside the established Western-led institutions — to coordinate on affordable medicines, shared early-warning systems for outbreaks, and recognition of traditional medicine.

The continuity items carry their own weight. The BRICS TB Research Network pools research capacity across members that together account for a large share of the world's tuberculosis cases, making collaboration on diagnostics, drug resistance and new regimens directly consequential. The push for evidence-based traditional medicine / TCIM reflects a shared interest among members — India, China, Brazil and others all maintain large traditional-medicine systems — in giving these practices a research base and a place in formal health systems rather than leaving them outside the regulatory frame. Read together with the proposed work on an integrated early-warning system and a digital health architecture, the nine priority areas show BRICS trying to build practical, shareable health infrastructure rather than issuing declarations alone — the test of which will be whether the networks deliver usable outputs by the time the chairship passes on.

For Mains