Buried in the text BRICS leaders adopted in New Delhi on Saturday sits a commitment to common guidelines for integrating disaster early warning data. A few pages on, the same document establishes an expert network on asset recovery and a shared repository for tracing fugitives wanted in corruption cases. Neither line will trend. Both describe work the G20 no longer does and both carry the signatures of governments that between them hold 49.5 percent of the world's population.
The easy reading of this weekend was rivalry, a Global South bloc squaring up to a Western club. India's year in the chair points somewhere more practical. In 2026 BRICS has behaved less like a challenger to the G20 than like its caretaker, holding files Washington put down until Washington is willing to pick them up again.
Start with what was removed. Reuters reported in July 2025 that the incoming American presidency intended to keep the leaders' summit and the finance track while scrapping the working groups and ministerial meetings on energy, health, commerce and the environment. In December, Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised a G20 that "shakes off ideological preoccupations around green energy," organised instead around deregulation, energy supply chains and new technologies. South Africa, a founding member, was dropped from the December guest list. The Council on Foreign Relations counted what went out with the agenda: climate change, debt, development, inequality and sustainability, all standing business of a forum whose Johannesburg declaration had run to 122 paragraphs a year earlier.
Now read India's calendar.
On 24 July, BRICS disaster ministers adopted a joint statement on early warning systems and resilient infrastructure. On 5 August, in Hyderabad, the anti-corruption working group agreed in principle to a practitioners' network that traces fugitives wanted for corruption. On 18 August, environment ministers adopted a people-centred adaptation framework and asked that adaptation finance arrive as grants or concessional loans. Energy ministers added guidance on storage and grids. Health officials backed an integrated early warning system for infectious disease outbreaks, a file the G20's own health working group used to carry.
Set those texts beside the working groups that were cut and the overlap runs close to line for line.
Why should anyone outside a ministry care? A glacier collapsed near Langtang Lirung on 26 August, on the Nepal-China border and the flood that followed has killed more than 1,280 people and left over 5,600 missing. No rain fell that morning. There was no cross-border warning channel to fail: Dharam Raj Uprety, who runs Nepal's disaster authority, said afterwards that "people even didn't get five minutes of lead time." Nepal has no weather stations high enough to see what was coming, and no standing arrangement to receive what the other side of the ridge could see. Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal has since filed a formal climate compensation claim with Nepal's partners. A G20 without an environmental track has no desk to receive that letter. BRICS ministers had put early warning data integration on paper a month before the water came.
The obvious objection is money. Adaptation finance sits in rich capitals, and BRICS communiqués bind nobody. The bloc does run a balance sheet: the New Development Bank has approved $42.9 billion across 139 projects. The bills land hardest on economies already absorbing Brent above $100. A forum that files flood defences and asset recovery under ideological preoccupations leaves finance ministries from Kathmandu to Nairobi to negotiate alone and pushes them towards whichever lender still answers the phone. That is a transfer of influence, not an act of charity and Washington is making it for free.
Membership arithmetic tells the same story from the other end. Three years ago India's G20 presidency seated the African Union at the top table. This year Donald Trump invited Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to Doral and President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev came to Delhi anyway. Middle powers are attending both, because BRICS has not asked them to choose. That is the cheapest advantage an institution can hold, and Miami surrendered it first. Cyril Ramaphosa sat at the Delhi table while his country stays out of the G20 until 2027, and spent Friday courting Indian investment in critical minerals and battery supply chains. Narendra Modi told the business forum the same day that "while trade barriers are rising globally, India is building economic bridges."
The rebuttal from Washington writes itself: a grouping that seats Russia and Iran is a rival lineup, not a custodian of anything. That confuses the function with the company.
Caretaking is a job description, not a character reference. Does a Nepali hydrologist have somewhere to send a data request in March? Right now the answer runs through Delhi, and after that through Beijing, because it no longer runs through the G20.
None of this makes BRICS a finished institution, and the flattery it attracts deserves suspicion. It has no permanent secretariat. Its sherpas spent the week before the summit reconciling Iran and UAE language on West Asia, and the compromise reads as a group anxious to avoid a split rather than one able to move a war. Xi Jinping told the room that "the trend towards a multipolar world is unstoppable," a sentence that costs nothing to say. The 140-point declaration is a filing system, not a budget, and length is not an achievement.
A filing system still beats an empty drawer. Modi closed the summit on Sunday calling the group "wider in reach and stronger in purpose," which is a claim in search of an instrument. Xi used the same platform to announce that China takes the chair and hosts the 2027 summit. The test over the next eighteen months is narrow and checkable: whether the New Development Bank lends against early warning systems in the valleys that keep flooding, and whether one extradition request actually moves through the new asset recovery network. Beijing should be judged on disbursement, not on communiqué length.
No presidency owns the global agenda, and none owns it for long. When Washington narrowed the G20's, the work on floods, adaptation finance and fugitive money did not disappear. It moved to a forum prepared to carry it. An American administration that returns to those files in 2027 or the one after it, will find them current rather than cold and will have India's year in the BRICS chair to thank for it.
Dr Imran Khalid is a columnist and geostrategic analyst.