PIB TrackerIndia takes BRICS chairship for the fourth time
India hosts the 2nd CGETI trade meeting at Gandhinagar as it chairs the BRICS grouping through 2026.
What happened
- The Commerce Secretary delivered the keynote at the 2nd Meeting of the BRICS Contact Group on Trade and Economic Issues (CGETI), held at Gandhinagar, Gujarat.
- It followed the first CGETI meeting of the cycle, held virtually in March 2026 — the Gandhinagar round was the first in-person trade gathering of India's chairship year.
- India has assumed the BRICS Chairship for the fourth time, following its earlier turns in 2012, 2016 and 2021.
- The chairship runs under the theme "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability."
- Deliberations focused on strengthening the multilateral trading system, the internationalisation of MSMEs, resilient global value chains, and the expansion of services trade.
- Delegates visited GIFT City, Gandhinagar — India's International Financial Services Centre — on 15 May 2026.
Background & context
BRICS is an inter-governmental grouping of major emerging economies that began as an investment-bank acronym — "BRIC", coined in 2001 to describe Brazil, Russia, India and China as the large, fast-growing economies expected to reshape global output. The idea moved from analysts' shorthand to a real diplomatic forum when the four held their first formal summit at Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2009. South Africa joined in 2010–11, turning "BRIC" into "BRICS" and giving the group an African pillar. The bloc has no founding charter and no permanent secretariat; it runs on an annual rotating chairship, a leaders' summit, and a web of sectoral working groups and ministerial tracks — of which trade is one.
The grouping widened sharply at the Johannesburg summit and the 2024 Kazan summit, when several new members were admitted in an enlargement often called "BRICS-plus". Alongside the five founders, the expanded membership now includes Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, with Indonesia also joining the expanded grouping; Saudi Arabia was invited and has been weighing full membership. The exact roster of full members versus partner-tier states has shifted edition to edition, so the safe exam anchor is the original five plus the post-2024 entrants named above. This widening is what makes the trade numbers in the present release significant: the CGETI is the standing forum where this larger membership negotiates the commercial agenda.
CGETI — the Contact Group on Trade and Economic Issues — is the senior-officials body that prepares the BRICS trade and economic agenda for the Trade Ministers' meeting and, ultimately, for the leaders' summit. It is where positions on World Trade Organization reform, customs cooperation, e-commerce, intellectual property and MSME support are hammered out before they rise to the ministerial and summit levels. Hosting two CGETI rounds in a single chairship year — the virtual March round and now the in-person Gandhinagar round — is the normal rhythm by which the chair drives the year's deliverables. India's Ministry of Commerce & Industry is the nodal ministry steering this track for the 2026 chairship.
The chairship rotates annually among members, and India's four turns trace the bloc's own evolution. Its first chairship in 2012 produced the Delhi summit, where the idea of a BRICS-led development bank was first seriously floated; that idea matured into the New Development Bank, agreed in principle by the time of the 2014 Fortaleza summit and formally established with its headquarters in Shanghai. India chaired again in 2016, hosting the Goa summit, and a third time in 2021, when it ran a largely virtual cycle during the pandemic. The 2026 chairship is therefore India's fourth lead of a bloc that has grown from four economies discussing investment prospects into a widened grouping with its own bank, a currency-swap arrangement and a standing trade-negotiation machinery.
It helps to place BRICS against a peer to see what it is and is not. Compared with the G20 — the broader forum of major economies that includes both Western powers and emerging markets and works largely on macro-financial coordination — BRICS is a smaller, emerging-market-only caucus that increasingly positions itself as a counterweight voice on trade and development finance. Compared with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which is security- and connectivity-focused and Eurasian in geography, BRICS is economy-led and spans four continents. And unlike a regional trade pact such as the RCEP or the European Union's single market, BRICS does not lower tariffs among its members or pool sovereignty; the CGETI coordinates positions and cooperation rather than binding members to a common commercial code.
For Prelims
- Grouping: BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, with post-2024 entrants Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE and Indonesia (the "BRICS-plus" enlargement).
- Origin of the term: "BRIC" coined in 2001; first leaders' summit at Yekaterinburg, Russia, 2009; South Africa added 2010–11 to make "BRICS".
- Structure: no charter, no permanent secretariat — runs on an annual rotating chairship and a leaders' summit.
- India's chairships: 4th time in 2026, after 2012, 2016 and 2021.
- This event: 2nd CGETI meeting, Gandhinagar; the 1st was virtual in March 2026.
- Theme of 2026 chairship: "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability."
- Intra-BRICS merchandise trade: rose thirteen-fold, from US$84 billion (2003) to US$1.17 trillion (2024), outpacing global trade growth.
- Share of global trade: still only about 5% — the release frames this as large untapped potential.
- India's exports to BRICS members: ≈US$82.0 billion in merchandise goods (FY 2025-26) and ≈US$31.3 billion in services (CY 2024).
- Trade-agenda priorities at the meeting: strengthening the multilateral trading system, internationalisation of MSMEs, resilient global value chains, expanding services trade.
- BRICS financial institutions to know: the New Development Bank (NDB), headquartered in Shanghai and established at the 2014 Fortaleza summit, and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), a currency-swap safety net — both are standing BRICS creations, distinct from the CGETI trade track.
Why it matters
The chairship hands India the pen on the year's BRICS economic agenda at a moment when the rules-based trading order is under strain. With WTO dispute settlement weakened and tariff measures spreading among major economies, a forum of large emerging markets becomes a place to coordinate positions on multilateral-trade reform and to build commercial channels that do not run only through Western institutions. The thirteen-fold rise in intra-BRICS trade shows how much commerce the bloc has internalised; the fact that it is still only about 5% of global trade is the gap the chairship is trying to close — and the reason India is pushing MSME internationalisation, services-trade expansion and resilient value chains rather than headline tariff cuts.
For India specifically, the numbers explain the stakes: US$82 billion in goods exports and US$31.3 billion in services exports to BRICS partners is a market India wants to grow and diversify, especially as it hedges against concentration in any single trading relationship. Hosting the round at Gandhinagar and taking delegates to GIFT City also signals India's pitch to route more of this trade and its financing through an Indian International Financial Services Centre — tying the foreign-policy forum to a domestic economic-infrastructure ambition.
India's role inside BRICS has consistently been that of a balancer. It champions the development-finance and south-south-cooperation strands — it was an early backer of the New Development Bank and holds an equal founding stake in it — while resisting any drift toward an explicitly anti-Western or de-dollarisation bloc, given its parallel partnerships in the Quad, the G20 and with the West. That balancing act is visible in the 2026 trade agenda: the emphasis on MSME internationalisation and services trade plays to Indian strengths, while the stated goal of "strengthening the multilateral trading system" keeps India anchored to an open, rules-based order rather than a closed regional preference. The structural caveat to note is the bloc's internal asymmetry — China's economy dwarfs the others, and unresolved India-China friction limits how far a genuinely common trade position can be pushed, which is part of why intra-BRICS trade remains modest relative to the members' global footprint.