As leaders gathered in New Delhi this weekend for the 18th BRICS Summit, one question will define whether the grouping’s expanded ambitions translate into real gains for the Global South. BRICS will matter only if its four pillars produce something developing countries actually need: greater strategic choice without new dependencies. 

The grouping does not suffer from a shortage of ambition; it suffers from a shortage of measurable delivery. What counts is not its declarations but a practical question: does BRICS give developing countries more options in trade, finance, technology and partnerships — or merely shift dependence from one set of powerful actors to another?

India has placed “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability” at the centre of its 2026 chairship, presenting the four themes as priorities for practical cooperation. Yet treated as a checklist, they risk becoming four boxes to tick rather than four drivers of tangible outcomes.

A label is not a test. The real test is simpler: does BRICS expand the strategic choices available to developing countries — in markets, finance, technology and partnerships — without quietly replacing one dependency with another? If the four pillars deliver on this, they matter. If they do not, they remain four words in search of a purpose. 

For South Asia, a region that knows both the cost of external dependence and the appeal of new partners, that question is not academic.

What BRICS Can Address

Expanding choice means having more than one export market, more than one source of capital, more than one technology partner, more than one route to development finance. It fails the moment a new relationship simply substitutes for an old one — swapping dependence on Western capital markets for dependence on a single BRICS creditor, or a Western technology standard for a BRICS one.

Diversification, not realignment, is the point. Judged against that standard, the four pillars stop being independent achievements to tally and become four mechanisms that succeed or fail by the same measure.

Resilience and cooperation are where the test applies most directly. Developing economies are exposed to shocks — wars that disrupt energy and fertilizer supplies, trade restrictions that interrupt supply chains, financial instability that triggers capital flight — precisely because so many of them depend on a narrow set of markets, suppliers and financiers. BRICS can address that narrowness: expanding trade among members, improving infrastructure connectivity, and using platforms such as the New Development Bank to widen access to development finance. 

Greater use of local currencies could reduce transaction costs and exposure to exchange-rate risk. None of this passes the test automatically. A developing economy that trades dependence on the US dollar and Western creditors for dependence on Chinese capital and a BRICS payment system has not diversified — it has relocated its dependency. The mechanism only works if it adds options rather than swaps patrons.

Innovation carries the same risk in a different form. Artificial intelligence, digital platforms and digital financial infrastructure are opening possibilities for countries once constrained by weak physical and institutional infrastructure — India's own experience with digital public goods is the clearest example inside BRICS itself. 

But technology transfer is not automatically diversifying. If BRICS cooperation simply moves developing countries from dependence on Western technology providers to dependence on a narrower set of BRICS ones, it has changed suppliers without expanding choice. The pillar passes the test only when it emphasizes diffusion, affordability and capacity building broadly enough that smaller firms and poorer households — not just governments and large corporations — gain new options.

Sustainability is where the test is hardest to satisfy, because BRICS members disagree sharply on what sustainability requires. Some are major fossil-fuel producers; others are among the world's largest energy consumers; several are still building basic infrastructure and industrial capacity. Developing countries need growth, industrialization and energy access at the same time as they face mounting climate risk and pressure to cut emissions — and asking them to absorb that tension without finance, technology and transition support would not be a choice at all, only a cost shifted onto those least able to bear it. 

A credible BRICS contribution here means climate finance and technology that developing countries can use on their own terms — not concessional lending with new strings attached, and not a repeat of the unmet climate-finance pledges developing countries have already learned to distrust from the wealthier world.

Cooperation supplies the connective tissue — and its own temptation. BRICS is often described as a counterweight to Western power, and there is a real geopolitical dimension to its calls for reform of global governance. But if BRICS defines its value primarily in opposition to the West, it risks failing its own test: offering developing countries a single new alignment rather than more choices. The more useful frame is South–South cooperation as one additional option among several, not a replacement bloc.

Choice Test for India         

India's stake in this framework deserves scrutiny too, precisely because it is setting the terms. As chair, New Delhi has positioned BRICS as one plank of its strategic autonomy — a hedge against overdependence on any single power in a fragmenting order, alongside its ties to the Quad, the West and its own neighbourhood. That instinct is sound, and it is the same instinct this framework asks of every developing economy. 

But the choice test applies to India as much as to the countries it hopes will follow its lead. If BRICS genuinely widens India's menu of markets, technology partners and financing sources without deepening its dependence on any one of them, it becomes a credible model for the rest of the Global South. If it merely trades one strategic tilt for another, it offers the region less of a template than the chairship's rhetoric suggests.

Turning the broader standard into practice takes more than four attractive principles. It takes benchmarks: how many alternative markets a trade arrangement actually opens, how many independent financing sources a new facility actually creates, whether a technology partnership reduces a country's reliance on a single supplier or simply substitutes a new one. BRICS' own diversity will make even that kind of accounting contested. But without it, “resilience,” “innovation,” “cooperation” and “sustainability” remain declarations, and declarations are cheap.

The Stakes for South Asia

Across South Asia, the same test recurs in different guises. Pakistan's recurring balance-of-payments crises show what happens when a country has too few financing options and too little room to negotiate; access to new lenders helps only if it expands the menu rather than adding one more conditional creditor. Sri Lanka's debt crisis taught a harder version of the same lesson — diversifying creditors without matching fiscal discipline simply distributes vulnerability across more capitals rather than removing it. Nepal's landlocked geography makes market and transit diversification an existential question rather than an abstract one, particularly for energy and trade routes that still run through a single neighbour.

For a country like Bangladesh, the practical question is not whether closer engagement with BRICS is symbolically attractive. It is whether that engagement can help diversify exports beyond a narrow product and market base, expand access to affordable infrastructure finance, reduce exposure to energy and food-supply shocks, and build domestic technological capability. Every proposed agreement should therefore be tested against four questions: Does it open a new market? Does it broaden the country's financing options? Does it transfer skills and technology? And does it leave the country with sufficient room to negotiate with other partners? The same four questions apply, with local variations, from Colombo to Kathmandu to Islamabad.

The BRICS Test

BRICS will not become meaningful simply by expanding its membership or issuing more ambitious declarations. Its credibility will depend on whether its institutions help developing countries — India included — negotiate from a position of greater choice. 

For South Asia and the wider Global South, the relevant measure is practical: more markets, more financing options, stronger domestic capabilities and fewer points of external vulnerability. BRICS need not replace the existing order to be useful. It must make that order less monopolistic, less conditional and less difficult for developing countries to navigate.

(The author is Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics, International University of Business Agriculture and Technology (IUBAT), Dhaka, Bangladesh and a current affairs commentator. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at golam.grasul@gmail.com)