India drives BRICS MSME agenda as 2026 chair

India, chairing BRICS in 2026, has opened its small-enterprise cooperation track under the bloc's New Industrial Revolution partnership, PartNIR.

What happened

• India holds the rotating Chair of BRICS in 2026 and has used the role to push a renewed agenda for cooperation among micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) across the member economies.
• This MSME track sits under the BRICS Partnership on the New Industrial Revolution (PartNIR), the bloc's standing framework for industrial and digital-economy cooperation.
• India's Ministry of Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises has been mandated, for the chairship year, to convene three SME Working Group Meetings and the inaugural BRICS MSME Forum.
• The 1st SME Working Group Meeting, held as a webinar on 24 April 2026, was themed "Access to Finance for MSMEs".
• Deliberations centred on bridging the MSME credit gap through financial inclusion, financial literacy and credit readiness, and on building fintech-driven ecosystems that expand SME credit and seamless cross-border trade payments.
• Member countries framed MSMEs as engines of growth, employment, innovation and inclusive development, while flagging access to credit as the binding constraint the group must address together.

Background & context

BRICS began as an investment-banking acronym — Jim O'Neill's 2001 grouping of Brazil, Russia, India and China as the large fast-growing economies of the new century — before the four turned the label into an actual diplomatic forum. The first leaders' summit was held at Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2009. South Africa joined in 2010, converting "BRIC" into "BRICS" and fixing the five founding members: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The bloc has no founding treaty, no charter and no permanent secretariat; it works through an annual summit, a rotating chair, and ministerial and working-group tracks, with decisions taken by consensus.

From 1 January 2024 the grouping expanded for the first time, admitting a wave of new members. Counting the entrants that took up full membership, BRICS in 2026 has eleven full members: the five founders plus Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (2024) and Indonesia (joined 2025). Several other states participate as partner countries rather than full members. The enlargement roughly doubled the membership and sharpened the bloc's claim to speak for the Global South, while also making consensus harder to build across a more diverse table — exactly the setting in which India's 2026 chairship operates.

PartNIR — the Partnership on the New Industrial Revolution — is the institutional home of the MSME work. It was established at the 2018 Johannesburg Summit (under South Africa's chairship) to help member economies seize the opportunities of the fourth industrial revolution: digitalisation, automation, advanced manufacturing and new industrial skills. PartNIR runs through an Advisory Group and works alongside a dedicated centre for industrial competences; its remit is to deepen industrial and digital-economy cooperation, share best practices, and build human capital for emerging technologies. Anchoring the small-enterprise agenda inside PartNIR signals that BRICS treats MSME modernisation — digital payments, fintech credit, technology adoption — as part of its industrial-transformation push rather than as a stand-alone charity track.

India's chairship in 2026 is its third turn hosting BRICS, after 2012 and 2021, and follows Brazil's 2025 chairship. Each chair sets thematic priorities and hosts the leaders' summit; India's decision to foreground MSMEs reflects a domestic reality — small enterprises form the backbone of its economy — projected outward onto the bloc's agenda. Why MSMEs travel well as a BRICS theme is easy to see: across the member economies, micro, small and medium firms account for the bulk of enterprises, a very large share of employment and a meaningful slice of exports, yet sit on the wrong side of the formal-credit line. The category is defined in India under the MSME Development framework by investment in plant and machinery or equipment together with annual turnover — a graded definition that lets policy reach firms from a single-person micro unit to a medium manufacturer. Taking that lived policy problem to a multilateral table is what the PartNIR SME track is built to do.

Two BRICS institutions are most likely to be confused with this track. PartNIR is a cooperation framework — working groups, advisory bodies and shared programmes, with no balance sheet of its own. The New Development Bank (NDB) is a full multilateral lender: agreed at the 2014 Fortaleza Summit, headquartered in Shanghai, it finances infrastructure and sustainable-development projects in member states, with each founding member holding an equal capital share. A second often-confused pair is the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) — a currency-swap-style liquidity backstop the BRICS central banks set up alongside the NDB — which is a financial-stability mechanism, not a development bank and not an industrial-cooperation track. The MSME finance agenda announced here belongs to PartNIR; it is not an NDB lending line and not a CRA facility, though the three are complementary parts of the same bloc.

The summit lineage situates the chairship in a longer arc: Yekaterinburg 2009 (first BRIC summit), the addition of South Africa in 2010, the Fortaleza Summit of 2014 that birthed the NDB and the CRA, the Johannesburg Summit of 2018 that created PartNIR, the 2023 Johannesburg Summit that announced the historic enlargement, and the 2024–25 entries that took the bloc to eleven full members. India's 2026 chairship inherits all of this institutional machinery and chooses to point one of its tracks at small-enterprise finance.

For Prelims

• Entity: BRICS — an inter-governmental grouping of major emerging economies; the acronym is its five founders, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.
• First summit: Yekaterinburg, Russia, 2009 (as BRIC); South Africa joined in 2010, making it BRICS.
• Structure: no charter, no treaty, no permanent secretariat; runs via an annual summit, a rotating annual chair and consensus decisions.
• Members in 2026 (11 full): Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (founders) · Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE (2024) · Indonesia (2025).
• 2026 chair: India — its third chairship after 2012 and 2021.
• PartNIR: BRICS Partnership on the New Industrial Revolution; established at the 2018 Johannesburg Summit; framework for industrial and digital-economy cooperation.
• MSME deliverables (India's chairship): three SME Working Group Meetings + the inaugural BRICS MSME Forum; convened by India's Ministry of MSME.
• 1st SME Working Group Meeting: webinar, 24 April 2026, theme "Access to Finance for MSMEs".
• NDB link: BRICS also runs the New Development Bank (set up 2014, Fortaleza Summit; headquartered in Shanghai) — the bloc's lending arm, distinct from PartNIR.

Why it matters

The problem the working group names is concrete: MSMEs generate the bulk of jobs and a large share of output in every BRICS economy, yet they remain chronically starved of formal credit. Lenders see them as small, informal, collateral-light and hard to assess, so a structural financing gap persists across the developing world. By making "Access to Finance for MSMEs" the opening theme, India is steering the bloc towards the levers that can close that gap without large public subsidy — credit-readiness support, financial literacy, and fintech-based underwriting that reads alternative data instead of demanding hard collateral. India brings a credible template here: its own stack of digital public infrastructure, account-based lending and platform-based supply-chain finance is among the world's most advanced experiments in lending to small firms at scale.

For India's foreign policy the move is doubly useful. It lets New Delhi shape the chairship around an economic-development theme that resonates across the enlarged Global-South membership, rather than around the harder geopolitical questions where the eleven members diverge. And it converts a domestic strength — a deep MSME policy ecosystem and a working digital-finance model — into diplomatic currency, positioning India as an agenda-setter and exporter of solutions within the bloc. The "seamless global trade payments" thread also nudges at one of BRICS's recurring ambitions: reducing friction and dependence in cross-border settlement among member economies.

For Mains

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