Chairing the 18th Summit, Bharat’s fourth, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi demonstrated that Bharat has found a new role in leading emerging and Global South countries on a path to becoming stakeholders in global strategic and economic events. 

 

Marking 20 years of BRICS, it has grown from a grouping to a 21-nation strong platform and a growing conglomerate of countries and leaders who agreed at a crucial time of wars and trade differences to a joint resolution and a common agenda.

 

Bharat emerged as a strong leader of 50% of the world’s population, 40% of global GDP, and more than 25% of global trade at a time when the combined GDP of BRICS countries has grown by around 4.5 times; that is, BRICS has grown at nearly twice the pace of the world economy.

 

The theme of Bharat’s BRICS Presidency is “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability". Modi in his concluding speech after the summit said 

Under Bharat’s Presidency, it has launched initiatives such as the BRICS Incubator Network, BRICS MSME Portal, and BRICS Startup Innovation Fund to create shared prosperity under these cooperation frameworks and further increase the exchange of investment and talent among our countries.

 

Modi said in the third decade of BRICS the BRICS Business Council should consider preparing a report on removing the top 10 trade barriers among BRICS countries, support 100 BRICS startups every year to scale into other BRICS markets, develop 1,000 new partnerships among our businesses and review our progress every year against these three benchmarks.