Reports · Oct 19, 2026
India Uses BRICS Co-Chairmanship to Push Multipolar Agenda on Trade and Development Finance
India, assuming the BRICS co-chairmanship alongside Russia in the October 2026 session, advanced a reformed agenda focused on development finance, digital public infrastructure, and trade settlement in local currencies, deliberately steering discussions away from anti-Western framing. New Delhi's approach reflects a strategic bet that a more pragmatically focused BRICS can deepen Indian influence across the Global South without triggering Western counter-balancing. A joint statement endorsed the New Development Bank's expanded lending mandate.
Contents
Key takeaways
- India chairs BRICS working group on digital public infrastructure, a flagship priority
- Joint statement endorses local currency trade settlement but stops short of dollar replacement language
- New Development Bank's lending mandate expanded to include private sector partnerships
- India successfully removed anti-NATO language from two draft texts during negotiations
- BRICS+ outreach: Indonesia, UAE, and Nigeria given enhanced partnership status
India's BRICS Strategy: Reshaping from Within
India's approach to its BRICS co-chairmanship, shared with Russia under the bloc's 2026 rotating structure, has been characterised by a systematic effort to redirect the organisation's agenda toward functional cooperation areas where New Delhi has comparative advantages — digital infrastructure, pharmaceutical access, and development finance — while moderating the explicitly anti-Western rhetoric that China and Russia have sought to embed in official statements. Indian diplomats successfully negotiated the removal of language referencing 'Western hegemonic financial architecture' and 'NATO aggression' from two working group texts, substituting formulations focused on 'multipolarity' and 'reformed global governance' that are more acceptable to the wider BRICS+ membership.
The Digital Public Infrastructure working group, chaired by India's Ministry of Electronics and IT, has become one of the BRICS's most substantive functional bodies, sharing Indian experience with Aadhaar, UPI, and DigiLocker with interested member and partner states. Ten BRICS and BRICS+ countries have signed cooperation agreements with India's National Payments Corporation to explore UPI integration or compatible systems. This positions India as a technology norm-setter within the grouping — a function that reinforces New Delhi's global influence without requiring confrontation with Western digital governance frameworks.
New Development Bank and Local Currency Finance
The NDB, established in 2015 and headquartered in Shanghai, received an expanded mandate at the October session authorising it to fund private sector and public-private partnership projects, a significant addition to its previously exclusive focus on sovereign lending. The new mandate was championed by India and Brazil, both of which have argued that infrastructure finance in developing countries requires mobilising private capital alongside public funds. The NDB's approved lending pipeline now stands at $32 billion, with India as both the largest borrower and the second-largest shareholder after China.
On local currency trade settlement, the joint statement endorses the principle and establishes a BRICS financial working group to develop practical mechanisms, but Indian insistence prevented any commitment to a timeline or a common currency instrument. New Delhi's position, as articulated by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her October 19 address, is that bilateral local currency settlements — already operational in India's trade with Russia and UAE — are preferable to a BRICS common currency mechanism that would inevitably be dominated by the Chinese renminbi. This distinction preserves Indian monetary sovereignty and avoids creating a structure that would primarily serve Beijing's internationalisation agenda.
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