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🌐 International RelationsMAINS · GS2.18

India chairs first BRICS 2026 tourism meeting

Under India's BRICS chairship, the inaugural Tourism Working Group met virtually to set the year's agenda ahead of an August ministerial in Jaipur.

What happened

Background & context

The event sits inside a larger machine. When a country holds the rotating annual chairship of BRICS, it does not host one summit alone — it runs the entire calendar of Sherpa meetings, sectoral ministerials and dozens of working groups across finance, trade, health, science, agriculture, environment and tourism. Tourism is one of these sectoral tracks, and the Tourism Working Group is the official-level body that prepares the ground for the political-level Tourism Ministers' Meeting. The sequence is deliberate: officials (the TWG) negotiate the substance through the year, and ministers (the TMM) then endorse the outcome — here, both staged back-to-back in Jaipur in August 2026.

BRICS began as "BRIC" — Brazil, Russia, India and China — a term the economist Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs coined in 2001 to label the large emerging economies. It became a real diplomatic grouping with its first formal summit at Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2009. South Africa joined in 2010, turning BRIC into BRICS (the "S"). A major expansion took effect on 1 January 2024, when the grouping admitted new members and is now commonly referred to as "BRICS+". The bloc has no founding treaty and no permanent headquarters; it works through an annually rotating chair and consensus, which is exactly why a chair year like India's 2026 term carries weight — the host shapes the agenda for every track, tourism included.

Tourism is a natural fit for a grouping of large, populous, fast-urbanising economies. Member states are simultaneously huge source markets (outbound travellers) and major destinations, so cooperation on visas, skilling, digital facilitation and sustainable destination management has direct economic payoff. India's choice of priorities — putting Artificial Intelligence and seamless travel facilitation at the front — mirrors its own domestic push on digital public infrastructure and ties the tourism track to the broader theme of resilience and innovation that runs across the chairship.

It also helps to place this grouping against its peers. BRICS is one of three plurilateral platforms where India sits alongside China and Russia, and the differences are exam-relevant. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a treaty-based body with a permanent Secretariat in Beijing and a security-and-counter-terror focus; the G20 is an informal forum of the world's largest economies that also rotates its presidency annually and similarly runs sherpa tracks and working groups. BRICS differs from both in being a consensus-driven, charter-free coalition of major emerging economies with a development-and-reform agenda — its members have pushed for a larger voice for the Global South in global financial governance. The grouping created its own development financier, the New Development Bank (NDB), headquartered in Shanghai, and discussions on settling trade in local currencies have been a recurring theme. A tourism working group is a smaller, sectoral expression of the same logic: practical cooperation among large emerging economies, built bottom-up through officials.

India's role within BRICS has been that of a balancing voice — a democracy and large market that engages China and Russia inside the bloc while keeping its own strategic autonomy. The grouping has no founding charter and no permanent secretariat, so continuity is carried by the rotating chair and by the sherpa channel rather than by a standing bureaucracy. That makes each chair year consequential: the host writes the agenda, sets the priorities, and decides where the substantive meetings happen — which is why India locating the 2nd TWG and the Tourism Ministers' Meeting in Jaipur is itself a deliberate act of agenda-setting and destination promotion rolled into one.

For Prelims

For UPSC: India holds the BRICS 2026 Chairship; the inaugural Tourism Working Group met virtually on 25 May 2026, and the Tourism Ministers' Meeting is set for 21–22 August 2026 in Jaipur, right after the 2nd TWG on 19–20 August. Remember the original five — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa — and that the "S" came from South Africa (2010).

What it is NOT

Why it matters

A chair year is the one time a member sets the whole agenda. By opening the tourism track itself and naming the four priorities, India steers what BRICS tourism cooperation will mean for the year — and it does so on themes where India has a domestic story to tell: AI and digital facilitation, responsible and sustainable tourism, and skilling. The grouping addresses a real coordination gap: member economies send and receive enormous travel flows, yet visa friction, uneven skilling and unequal digital infrastructure hold back the sector's contribution to jobs and foreign exchange. A working group is the unglamorous but necessary machinery that turns broad intent into negotiated text before ministers sign off.

For India specifically, hosting the substantive sessions in Jaipur is also destination diplomacy — showcasing a heritage city to source markets across the bloc while building soft-power links. The exercise illustrates how India uses plurilateral groupings of the Global South to advance both economic interests (tourism receipts, jobs) and a leadership narrative, without the binding commitments that a formal treaty body would demand.

The four priorities are also a window into where India sees the sector heading. AI and Tourism points at chatbots, demand forecasting, multilingual assistance and smart destination management. Sustainability and Responsible Tourism responds to over-tourism and the carbon footprint of travel, aligning with the global push on responsible destination management. Skilling and Capacity Building targets the labour-intensive nature of the industry — hospitality, guiding and travel services are large employers, and trained manpower is the binding constraint. Seamless Travel Facilitation covers visas, e-visa interoperability and digital arrival systems that lower friction for travellers moving between member states. Read together, the four are a coherent agenda: make travel between large emerging economies easier, greener, better-staffed and more digitally enabled — and use the chair year to put that agenda on the BRICS table.

For Mains

Exemplification
A concrete example of how a rotating chairship lets a member shape a multilateral agenda — India used its BRICS 2026 chair to set tourism priorities (AI, sustainability, skilling, seamless travel) and host the ministerial in Jaipur.
Position
Signals the government's stance that BRICS / Global-South plurilateralism is a usable platform for India's economic diplomacy — leveraging tourism, digital facilitation and skilling rather than hard-security agendas.
Substantiation
Supplies dated, factual scaffolding (TWG on 25 May 2026; TMM on 21–22 Aug 2026, Jaipur) for any answer on India's engagement with regional and global groupings in 2026.
Deploys into: GS2.18 — bilateral, regional and global groupings and agreements involving India and/or affecting India's interests; India's use of plurilateral platforms for economic and soft-power diplomacy.

Related

Ministry of Tourism · 2026-05-25 · PRID 2265100 · PIB source ↗