For much of the world, BRICS has been viewed through the camera lens: a diplomatic runway of handshakes, family photographs and headlines. But what the world mistook for a headline factory is, in reality, a solution factory and an agenda-setter. Behind the optics is a grouping building practical mechanisms for trade, development finance, cross-border payments and technology, while giving emerging economies a greater say in shaping the global order.
The test of BRICS is not whether its members think alike but whether countries that do not think alike can still build together. What began with four countries in 2006 now encompasses members and partners across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. Together, BRICS countries represent about half of humanity, roughly 40% of global GDP and more than a quarter of global trade. It has travelled from an acronym describing emerging economies to a platform with growing economic and political weight.
BRICS is sometimes portrayed as an attempt to replace the West. That misses its more interesting purpose. Developing countries do not necessarily want to exchange one centre of power for another; they want greater room to manoeuvre in an increasingly fragmented world. Consider finance. The debate is often reduced to whether BRICS will create a common currency. The more immediate work is less dramatic but potentially more useful: making cross-border payments faster and cheaper, improving interoperability between payment systems and expanding the use of local currencies in trade and financing. The significance lies not in displacing the existing financial order, but in reducing dependence on any single route through it. The New Development Bank follows the same logic. It does not have to replace the World Bank to matter; it provides developing economies with another source of development finance and an institutional space in which their priorities carry greater weight.
Trade demonstrates how rapidly this political architecture is acquiring economic substance. Intra-BRICS commerce has grown enormously from the grouping’s early years, crossing the trillion-dollar mark. India alone traded about $226 billion with other BRICS economies in the first half of 2026. These relationships are now too substantial for BRICS to be treated simply as diplomatic theatre.
India and South Africa illustrate what the next stage could look like. Bilateral trade reached $19.25 billion in 2023-24, compared with about $11.5 billion three years earlier and remained above $18 billion in 2024-25. But the next ambition cannot simply be selling more goods to one another. The economic conversations around this BRICS summit pointed precisely in that direction, with India and South Africa identifying critical minerals and beneficiation, green industrialisation, electric-vehicle and battery value chains, infrastructure, agriculture, digital technologies and skills as areas for deeper cooperation. More than 150 Indian companies have already invested over $10 billion in South Africa, creating more than 18 000 jobs, giving this partnership an economic base on which to build.
South Africa possesses critical minerals, industrial capabilities and a strategic position within Africa. India brings manufacturing scale, pharmaceuticals, digital capabilities, technology and one of the world’s largest consumer markets. The opportunity is to create value chains together: processing minerals, manufacturing components, expanding pharmaceutical production, developing clean-energy technologies and linking Indian investment to African industrialisation. Africa should not simply become a larger market for Indian goods. It should become a larger manufacturing partner for India. The African Continental Free Trade Area makes this proposition even more significant. South Africa can become an important gateway for Indian investment into African production networks, while India can connect South African businesses more deeply with Asian markets.
BRICS has also acquired a political function that is easily underestimated. Expansion has made agreement harder, not easier. Members arrive with different alliances, regional interests and strategic anxieties, yet they continue to negotiate common positions through consultation and consensus. Consensus among countries that already agree is easy. Consensus among countries that do not is diplomacy. This matters in an international system increasingly defined by fragmentation and real-time crises. BRICS cannot resolve every war or political confrontation, nor should declarations be confused with solutions. But it can preserve channels of conversation on conflict, terrorism, energy and food security, climate change, supply-chain disruptions and financial instability.
There is another consequence of expansion. Countries from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East that have too often been recipients of global rules now have a larger role in conversations about making them. The Global South does not need another table at which it is invited to listen. It needs tables at which it helps write the agenda. For South Africa and India, this has particular resonance. Both have consistently argued that multilateralism cannot remain credible when institutions claiming to represent the world inadequately reflect its demographic and economic realities.
BRICS should therefore resist becoming obsessed with proving that it is larger than the G7 or capable of replacing institutions created after the Second World War. Its relevance does not depend on defeating another bloc. Its more compelling possibility lies in creating practical instruments for trade, finance, technology and diplomacy while giving developing economies greater agency within the international system. India and South Africa can give this ambition practical meaning by moving their relationship beyond historical solidarity towards industrialisation, investment, technology and shared development.
Twenty years ago, BRICS was an interesting acronym. Then it became a summit. Today, it is becoming an institution with economic weight and diplomatic consequence. Its next task is harder: to turn a shared voice into shared powerand shared power into outcomes that people can actually see.
Malika Pandey is a public policy expert with years of experience working across key ministries of the Government of India.