The world is not becoming less connected.
It is becoming less willing to depend on a single source.
That distinction explains much of what has changed over the past decade. Countries still trade, invest, and cooperate across borders. What they increasingly resist is relying too heavily on one supplier, one market, one technology ecosystem, one energy route, or one financial network. Diversification has quietly become one of the defining ideas shaping global economic policy.
It is showing up almost everywhere.
Governments are redesigning supply chains that once prioritized efficiency above everything else. Manufacturers are spreading production across multiple countries. Central banks are paying closer attention to financial resilience. Energy security has moved from the margins of economic policy to its centre. Even digital infrastructure, once treated largely as a commercial issue, is now discussed alongside national security.
None of these developments happened overnight. The pandemic exposed fragile supply chains. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced governments to rethink energy dependence. Intensifying competition between the United States and China accelerated efforts to secure critical technologies and manufacturing capacity. Events differed, but they reinforced the same lesson.
Overdependence carries a cost.
India assumes the BRICS presidency in the middle of this transition.
That timing matters more than the presidency itself.
For much of its history, BRICS was viewed as an ambitious grouping whose rhetoric often outpaced its achievements. It represented a shared frustration among major emerging economies, but it struggled to convince many observers that it could become more than a periodic diplomatic forum.
Today, the context is different.
Countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East are not simply asking whether existing global institutions should be reformed. Many are looking for additional partnerships that reduce strategic dependence without forcing them into rigid geopolitical camps.
That is a subtle but important shift.
The conversation is no longer about replacing one system with another. It is increasingly about building a wider network of options.
Seen from that perspective, India’s BRICS presidency becomes part of a much larger story. It is less about whether one country can reshape the international order than about whether emerging economies can build practical alternatives that make the global system more flexible, more resilient, and less concentrated.
Everything that follows—trade, technology, infrastructure, energy, healthcare, finance—fits inside that broader question.
Why This Presidency Arrives at a Different Moment
Timing often matters as much as leadership.
A decade ago, the strongest argument for globalization was efficiency. Companies concentrated production where costs were lowest, governments encouraged deeper economic integration, and resilience received comparatively little attention because global supply chains appeared dependable.
That assumption has weakened.
A semiconductor shortage slowed automobile production across several continents. Shipping disruptions left manufacturers waiting months for components that once arrived in weeks. Europe’s scramble to replace Russian natural gas demonstrated how quickly a commercial relationship could become a strategic liability. None of these events created the shift toward diversification. They accelerated it.
The implications reach well beyond crisis management.
Industrial policy has returned in ways few economists predicted twenty years ago. Countries now compete to attract semiconductor fabrication plants, battery manufacturing, pharmaceutical production, and critical mineral processing. They are competing for resilience as much as growth.
Investment decisions increasingly reflect the same logic.
When companies evaluate where to build their next factory, labour costs remain important. Increasingly, they also ask different questions.
How reliable is the electricity supply?
How exposed is this location to geopolitical disruption?
Can components be sourced from multiple countries if one route fails?
The conversation has changed.
BRICS has changed with it.
Its recent expansion reflects a broader demand among emerging economies for more diversified partnerships. Yet a larger membership also introduces a paradox. Every additional member strengthens the group’s global reach while making agreement more difficult.
That contradiction deserves more attention than it usually receives.
Many critics argue that BRICS risks becoming too broad to act decisively. More voices can mean greater legitimacy, but they can also produce slower decisions and less policy coherence. It is a fair criticism, particularly as membership expands.
The counterargument is that today’s international economy is becoming more diverse precisely because it is becoming more fragmented. A coalition built around flexibility rather than uniformity may be untidy, but it could also be better suited to a world where countries increasingly resist fixed alignments.
Whether that proves true remains an open question.
India’s presidency will not answer it on its own.
It may offer an early indication.
The Presidency Is Less Powerful Than It Appears
The title can be misleading.
Holding the BRICS presidency does not give India authority over the organization. It gives India the opportunity to influence its direction—for a limited period and within clear constraints.
The presiding country sets agendas, hosts ministerial meetings and the annual summit, coordinates discussions, and tries to move proposals toward agreement. Much of that work happens quietly, well before leaders gather for the final summit.
The public usually sees the communiqué.
It rarely sees the negotiation that made it possible.
That is one reason international institutions often appear slower than critics would like. Consensus is not simply a diplomatic ideal; it is the mechanism through which these organizations function. Without it, even technically straightforward initiatives can stall.
Which raises a more interesting question.
If the world is becoming less dependent on single centres of power, can institutions built around consensus become more valuable than institutions built around hierarchy?
BRICS does not have to resemble older organizations to become influential. It may evolve differently.
Or it may discover that flexibility comes at the expense of effectiveness.
The presidency offers India an opportunity to test that balance rather than resolve it.
Why India Occupies an Unusual Position
India’s influence inside BRICS is not based solely on economic size.
It comes from occupying a space that relatively few major powers do.
New Delhi has strengthened strategic cooperation with the United States in advanced technology, defence, and the Indo-Pacific. It continues to purchase energy from Russia while maintaining dialogue with Europe. Economic ties with the Gulf have deepened. Partnerships across Africa have expanded. Engagement with Southeast Asia has become steadily more important.
At first glance, those relationships can seem contradictory.
They are better understood as a response to the same reality confronting many middle powers: dependence has become increasingly risky.
India’s foreign policy has long been described as strategic autonomy. The phrase is sometimes dismissed as diplomatic branding, yet its practical relevance has grown as geopolitical competition has intensified. The ability to work with competing powers without becoming fully aligned with any one of them is now an economic advantage as much as a diplomatic one.
Many countries in the Global South recognize that dilemma.
They are trying to diversify investment without losing access to existing markets. They want technology partnerships without becoming locked into a single ecosystem. They seek security cooperation while preserving room for independent decision-making.
India is navigating many of the same pressures.
Its domestic transformation reinforces that position.
The rapid expansion of digital public infrastructure offers one example. Platforms such as Aadhaar, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), and the broader India Stack have demonstrated that large-scale digital systems can expand financial inclusion at relatively low cost. Countries including Singapore have already linked payment systems with UPI, while several governments in Africa and Southeast Asia have explored elements of India Stack as they modernize their own digital infrastructure.
What attracts attention is not simply the technology.
It is the model.
Unlike many advanced economies, India built these systems while managing the scale and developmental constraints familiar to much of the Global South. That makes the experience easier to adapt than many imported policy frameworks.
Perhaps that is India’s most understated advantage.
Its credibility increasingly comes not from claiming to have all the answers, but from demonstrating that meaningful progress is possible under conditions many developing economies understand firsthand.
Whether that credibility can be translated into broader cooperation is another matter.
That question runs through the rest of this story.
What Success Would Actually Look Like
There is a temptation to judge every BRICS presidency by the size of its announcements.
That is probably the wrong benchmark.
If the international economy is moving away from concentrated dependence, then success is less about creating new systems overnight and more about giving countries credible alternatives over time. The most meaningful changes are often the least dramatic. They alter incentives first. Headlines come later.
Viewed through that lens, India’s presidency becomes easier to understand.
The question is not whether BRICS can replace existing institutions. It is whether it can make dependence less absolute.
Trade Is Really About Trust
The debate around BRICS trade almost always ends up in the same place: the US dollar.
It is an important discussion. It is probably not the most important one.
Most companies expanding across emerging markets are not redesigning supply chains because they have suddenly developed strong views about reserve currencies. They are responding to a simpler concern: concentration creates vulnerability.
A single shipping disruption can halt production. One sanctions regime can complicate payments. A factory that relies on a single overseas supplier may discover that the cheapest supply chain is not always the most resilient.
That is why businesses increasingly talk about redundancy, not just efficiency.
The phrase “China Plus One” captures this shift. Companies such as Apple have gradually expanded manufacturing into countries like India and Vietnam—not because China has become irrelevant, but because relying too heavily on one production base has become a strategic risk.
Notice what changed.
The objective was diversification, not replacement.
The same logic appears in discussions around local-currency trade and cross-border payment systems. These initiatives are often interpreted as attempts to challenge the existing financial order. In practice, they are just as much about giving businesses more ways to settle transactions when traditional channels become difficult or expensive.
Trust is becoming infrastructure.
That changes the discussion entirely.
Because once trade becomes a question of resilience, it naturally leads somewhere else.
Investment.
Capital Now Follows Stability as Much as Opportunity
Emerging economies have always competed for investment.
Increasingly, they are competing for confidence.
There is a difference.
Investors can identify profitable projects almost anywhere. What they struggle to predict is political uncertainty, financing delays, regulatory inconsistency, or infrastructure that fails to keep pace with industrial growth. Those risks often matter more than projected returns.
This is where development finance quietly becomes strategic.
The New Development Bank was created to expand infrastructure financing across emerging economies. Its portfolio already includes metro rail systems in India, renewable energy projects in Brazil, water and sanitation programmes in South Africa, and transport infrastructure elsewhere within the BRICS network.
None of those projects changed the global economy.
Collectively, they begin changing investment behaviour.
A modern logistics corridor does more than reduce transport costs. It changes where companies build factories. A reliable electricity grid makes advanced manufacturing more viable. Better ports reshape export competitiveness for decades.
Infrastructure is often described as public spending.
In reality, it is an investment signal.
Countries rarely attract long-term manufacturing simply because wages are competitive. They attract it because investors believe the surrounding ecosystem will still function fifteen or twenty years from now.
Confidence compounds.
Which helps explain why conversations about infrastructure increasingly overlap with conversations about technology.
Technology Has Become the New Geography
For much of the digital era, technology companies operated as though geography mattered less.
Governments no longer have that luxury.
Artificial intelligence depends on computing power. Computing power depends on semiconductors. Semiconductor production depends on highly specialized supply chains, stable electricity, advanced logistics, critical minerals, and skilled workforces.
One dependency reveals another.
That realization has transformed technology policy around the world.
The United States has introduced large-scale incentives for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Europe has done the same. India has launched semiconductor incentive programmes while expanding electronics manufacturing under its broader industrial strategy.
Different governments.
The same instinct.
Reduce critical dependencies before they become strategic weaknesses.
India’s digital public infrastructure offers a different example of the same principle.
Platforms such as Aadhaar, UPI, and India Stack were not designed as geopolitical tools. Yet they have gradually become instruments of international cooperation because they demonstrate that digital infrastructure can be built at scale without relying exclusively on proprietary commercial ecosystems.
The agreement linking India’s UPI with Singapore’s PayNow system is often discussed as a payments innovation.
It is also something else.
A demonstration that trusted digital systems can become bridges between economies rather than just domestic platforms.
Technology cooperation inside BRICS is therefore unlikely to revolve around grand declarations.
The more interesting question is whether members can build interoperable systems while remaining commercial competitors.
That tension will not disappear.
It may become the defining characteristic of twenty-first-century industrial policy.
And industrial policy inevitably raises another issue.
Energy.
Energy Determines More Than Electricity
Factories do not choose locations based only on tax incentives.
They also ask whether the lights stay on.
Reliable energy has quietly become one of the most important competitive advantages in global manufacturing. Semiconductor fabrication plants, data centres, pharmaceutical facilities, and battery factories all require uninterrupted power. Without it, industrial strategy remains theoretical.
The conversation around energy has therefore changed.
Oil still matters.
Natural gas still matters.
Renewables matter even more than they did a decade ago.
But increasingly, governments are thinking beyond individual energy sources. They are asking whether their economies can withstand disruption if one source suddenly becomes unavailable.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine accelerated that shift. Europe responded by rapidly diversifying natural gas imports, investing more heavily in renewables, and expanding alternative supply routes. The lesson extended well beyond Europe.
Dependence had become measurable risk.
Within BRICS, this creates an unusual opportunity.
Several members are major energy producers. Others are among the world’s largest consumers. Some dominate critical mineral production. Others are investing heavily in battery manufacturing or green hydrogen.
Their interests overlap.
They do not always align.
That difference matters.
Energy cooperation is likely to succeed not where countries agree on everything, but where reducing mutual vulnerability serves everyone’s interests.
The implications reach well beyond energy policy.
They reach the price of food.
Food Is Where Globalization Becomes Personal
Energy disruptions eventually show up somewhere unexpected.
At the grocery store.
Higher fuel costs raise transport expenses. Fertilizer becomes more expensive. Shipping slows. Weather shocks compound existing pressures. By the time food inflation reaches households, the disruption has usually travelled through several industries first.
That is why food security has quietly moved out of agriculture ministries and into national security discussions.
The issue is no longer producing enough food. Many countries can do that. The harder question is whether food systems remain resilient when global supply chains come under stress.
Recent years have provided uncomfortable reminders. Grain exports from the Black Sea were disrupted by war. Fertilizer markets tightened. Extreme weather affected harvests across multiple regions. None of these shocks existed in isolation, yet together they exposed how dependent many countries had become on supply chains they did not control.
Diversification, once again, becomes the underlying response.
Different suppliers.
Different shipping routes.
More domestic storage.
Smarter irrigation.
Better agricultural technology.
These are not simply farming policies. They are insurance policies for economic stability.
And food inevitably leads to something even more fundamental.
Public health.
COVID Changed More Than Healthcare
The pandemic did not convince governments that healthcare matters.
They already knew that.
It convinced them that medical supply chains matter just as much.
Countries that struggled to obtain vaccines, protective equipment, active pharmaceutical ingredients, or basic medical devices discovered that health security could not be separated from industrial capacity. Dependence that once looked efficient suddenly looked fragile.
That lesson has not disappeared simply because the emergency has.
India occupies an unusual position here.
Its pharmaceutical industry supplies a significant share of the world’s generic medicines, while Indian manufacturers played a major role in producing and exporting vaccines during the pandemic. Through initiatives such as Vaccine Maitri, India supplied vaccines to dozens of countries, particularly across Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.
The programme was often viewed through the lens of diplomacy.
It also demonstrated something more practical.
Manufacturing capacity creates influence.
The next phase of cooperation is therefore unlikely to revolve only around responding to future pandemics. It is more likely to focus on building diversified pharmaceutical supply chains, expanding regional manufacturing, improving disease surveillance, and reducing dependence on a handful of production centres.
Healthcare has become part of economic resilience.
Not a separate conversation.
By now a pattern should be apparent.
Trade.
Technology.
Energy.
Food.
Healthcare.
They appear to be different issues.
Increasingly, governments treat them as the same challenge viewed from different angles.
Why the Global South Sees Opportunity
Much of the commentary around BRICS assumes developing countries are searching for an alternative world order.
The evidence suggests something more pragmatic.
Most governments are looking for more room to manoeuvre.
African economies want infrastructure that supports industrialization rather than simply exporting raw materials. Latin American countries rich in lithium and copper are trying to attract battery manufacturing instead of remaining commodity suppliers. Southeast Asian economies continue expanding trade with China while strengthening security ties elsewhere. Gulf states are investing far beyond hydrocarbons as they prepare for a different economic future.
Different regions.
Remarkably similar strategy.
Expand options.
Reduce dependence.
That helps explain why BRICS has attracted growing interest despite its internal differences.
Many countries are not expecting the grouping to replace institutions such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. They are looking for additional channels—for finance, technology, investment, and diplomacy.
Choice has become a strategic asset.
Not every country sees this transition in the same way.
Some critics argue that BRICS is trying to do too many things at once. As membership expands, they contend, the group risks becoming more representative but less effective. More voices can strengthen legitimacy while making decisive action harder.
The criticism deserves to be taken seriously.
After all, history offers plenty of examples of international organizations that gradually became better at issuing declarations than implementing them.
Yet fragmentation creates its own pressures.
When countries become less comfortable depending on a small number of institutions, they inevitably begin experimenting with additional ones—even if those institutions are imperfect.
Perfection is not the benchmark.
Utility is.
The Hardest Negotiation Is Inside BRICS Itself
This is where the optimism surrounding BRICS meets reality.
Its members are not moving in lockstep.
Some depend heavily on commodity exports. Others are pursuing advanced manufacturing. Financial systems differ. Security priorities differ. Even their relationships with the world’s major powers differ.
Consensus sounds straightforward until specific interests collide.
Payment systems illustrate the point.
Designing alternative settlement mechanisms is not simply a technical exercise. It involves central banks, commercial banks, regulators, currency markets, legal systems, and political trust. Every additional participant makes coordination more complicated.
That complexity is not unique to BRICS.
It is the price of building institutions in a multipolar world.
Perhaps that is the contradiction the group will have to live with.
The same diversity that gives BRICS relevance also limits its speed.
India and China: Competition Without Complete Separation
Few relationships illustrate today’s international economy better than that between India and China.
They compete for manufacturing investment.
They compete for technology leadership.
They compete for geopolitical influence across Asia and beyond.
Yet they continue working together within forums such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
At first glance, that seems inconsistent.
It is increasingly normal.
The old assumption that countries must either cooperate or compete has become less convincing. Modern international relations are untidy. Rivals trade with one another. Security partners compete commercially. Governments disagree in one arena while collaborating in another.
India’s diplomatic approach reflects that reality.
Strategic autonomy is often described as foreign policy.
It is also economic policy.
Maintaining relationships across multiple centres of power gives India greater flexibility as supply chains diversify and investment patterns shift. Many middle-income economies are trying to do something similar, even if they describe it differently.
Whether India and China can continue separating areas of cooperation from areas of competition remains uncertain.
That uncertainty is part of the story—not a flaw in it.
Markets Usually Notice Before Politics Does
Diplomatic language rarely moves financial markets.
Expectations do.
A multinational manufacturer deciding where to build its next plant is making assumptions about the next twenty years, not the next summit. Investors pay attention to transport networks, electricity reliability, digital infrastructure, labour skills, regulatory consistency, and political stability because those factors determine whether long-term projects remain viable.
This is already visible.
Companies diversifying production have expanded investment across India, Vietnam, Mexico, and Indonesia rather than concentrating exclusively in one manufacturing base. Banks have adjusted risk assessments. Logistics companies have redesigned shipping routes. Even insurers increasingly price geopolitical risk into commercial decisions.
These changes rarely happen all at once.
Then they become impossible to ignore.
Economic geography has a habit of changing quietly until everyone suddenly agrees it has already changed.
That may ultimately prove more significant than any declaration issued at a summit.
How Should Success Actually Be Measured?
International summits have a habit of creating the wrong expectations.
Attention gravitates toward the final communiqué, the leaders’ photograph, or the headline announcement. Those moments are visible. The quieter indicators of success rarely are.
A presidency that produces fewer declarations but more follow-through may prove more consequential than one remembered for ambitious promises that never leave the page.
That is worth keeping in mind when judging India’s year at the helm of BRICS.
If the presidency ends with new financing mechanisms that businesses actually use, payment systems that reduce friction, digital partnerships that other countries choose to adopt, or infrastructure projects that attract long-term private investment, it will have altered behaviour rather than simply shaped the news cycle.
Behaviour usually outlasts rhetoric.
Three Possible Futures
Instead of asking whether India’s presidency will succeed or fail, it is more useful to ask what kind of future BRICS is drifting toward.
A More Practical BRICS
The most optimistic outcome is not that BRICS suddenly rivals every established international institution.
It is that the grouping becomes steadily better at solving specific problems.
Cross-border payment systems become easier to use. Infrastructure financing expands. Digital public infrastructure is shared more widely. Energy cooperation becomes more predictable. Businesses begin treating BRICS initiatives as commercially relevant rather than politically symbolic.
None of those changes would dominate headlines on their own.
Taken together, they would suggest something more significant: countries are gradually building additional layers into the global economic system instead of relying on a single one.
A Gradual Evolution
History suggests this is the more likely path.
Some initiatives move forward. Others remain unfinished. Working groups continue meeting long after the summit ends. Governments implement what aligns with national priorities and quietly set aside what does not.
From a distance, that can look like limited progress.
From inside international institutions, it often looks like normal progress.
The institutions that shaped the post-war global economy were not created fully formed. They evolved through years of negotiation, experimentation, revision, and occasional failure.
BRICS is unlikely to be any different.
A Larger Group, Slower Decisions
The less optimistic scenario is also the simplest.
Expansion begins to outpace coordination.
As membership grows, priorities become more diverse, negotiations become longer, and ambitious proposals gradually give way to carefully worded compromises. BRICS remains influential because of the economies it represents, but translating political agreement into practical outcomes becomes increasingly difficult.
There is no easy solution to that tension.
The qualities that make the group more representative also make it harder to govern.
That contradiction may persist regardless of who holds the presidency.
The Story Beyond BRICS
Stepping back, one point becomes difficult to ignore.
This article was never really about BRICS.
BRICS is one expression of a broader shift already underway.
The deeper story is that governments, businesses, and investors are reorganising around the idea that resilience now matters almost as much as efficiency. Supply chains are becoming more distributed. Manufacturing is spreading across multiple regions. Financial relationships are becoming more diverse. Digital infrastructure is being treated as strategic infrastructure. Energy security is influencing industrial policy. Healthcare capacity is being viewed through the lens of national preparedness.
Different sectors.
The same instinct.
Reduce excessive dependence before the next disruption arrives.
That does not mean globalization is ending.
It means globalization is changing shape.
The world that emerged after the Cold War rewarded concentration because concentration reduced costs. The world taking shape today still rewards openness, but it places a higher premium on optionality.
Countries want access to more markets.
Companies want more suppliers.
Governments want more strategic flexibility.
Those goals are remarkably consistent, even when politics is not.
India’s presidency sits at the intersection of that transition.
Its importance lies less in what it can transform than in what it reveals about the direction of the international economy.
Conclusion
Whether India’s BRICS presidency is ultimately judged a success will depend on outcomes that are unlikely to be visible immediately.
Not because they are unimportant.
Because structural change rarely announces itself while it is happening.
If India’s leadership helps strengthen trusted payment networks, expands development finance, encourages technology partnerships, improves energy cooperation, or deepens supply-chain resilience, the effects will accumulate gradually through investment decisions, commercial relationships, and policy choices made well after the summit concludes.
That is how most economic transitions unfold.
Quietly at first.
Then, over time, they begin to look inevitable.
The question posed at the beginning of this article was whether India’s BRICS presidency could redefine the Global South.
Perhaps that was never the most interesting question.
A more revealing one is whether the presidency becomes another sign that the international economy is entering an era where influence comes less from being the centre of every network and more from being connected to many of them.
If that is the direction the world is taking, India’s presidency will be remembered not because it changed history in a single year, but because it reflected where history was already heading.
