By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 9/13/16
The 18th BRICS Summit concluded in New Delhi, India (September 12–13, 2026) under India’s chairmanship, guiding a heavily expanded 11-member bloc amidst intense regional conflicts.
India has achieved a major diplomatic breakthrough by securing a unanimous joint declaration. The text successfully bridged deep fractures over the West Asia conflict between members like Iran and the UAE.
Member states finalized a diverse list of actionable outcomes. These focused on practical cooperation in agriculture, food security, health, energy, and disaster resilience.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced a strategy to deepen intra-bloc integration. This calls on the BRICS Business Council to eliminate the top 10 trade barriers, back 100 startups annually, and form 1,000 new partnerships.
India heavily pushed its low-cost, scalable DPI model as an adaptable blueprint for economic development across the Global South.
The bloc renewed its collective demand to reform legacy Western-dominated institutions. This includes pushing for structural updates to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), IMF, and World Bank.
Prominent international observer and former diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar has offered a highly strategic evaluation of the summit’s long-term geopolitical value
Bhadrakumar argues that BRICS is fundamentally rewriting the global balance of power. He notes that unlike the West, none of the BRICS members built their economic power on a history of bloody colonial wars or global dominance.
He outlines that New Delhi is perfectly content using BRICS to push for a more just and stable world order. The platform enables India to champion the Global South while maintaining independent strategic autonomy.
Bhadrakumar highlights that Western pressure tactics—such as unilateral U.S. tariffs and sanctions—are backfiring. He points out that Russia and China already handle almost all of their trade in rubles and yuan.
He emphasizes that India’s push for an early Free Trade Agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) will accelerate non-dollar local currency trade. This financial pivot effectively creates a major hole in Western economic architecture.
BRICS advances in trade payment systems focus on building a decentralized, multi-tiered network to bypass the Western-dominated SWIFT system and reduce transaction costs. Rather than introducing a single, monolithic currency, the bloc has chosen a modular approach focused on local currency trade settlement and technological integration.
The core strategy relies on linking member states’ highly advanced domestic instant payment systems. The technical and policy framework connects India’s UPI, Brazil’s Pix, Russia’s SPFS, and China’s CIPS. Major infrastructure expansions—such as China updating its Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) rules to lower entry barriers for foreign direct participants—serve as immediate conduits for alternative cross-border clearing.
A central milestone is the targeted implementation of BRICS Pay, a decentralized, blockchain-based financial messaging ecosystem. Coordinated through an open payment ecosystem architecture, it is built to allow member nations and partner economies to trade directly using their local currencies. The system is designed to share source code and integrate directly into existing national payment infrastructures rather than acting as a top-down replacement.
All core BRICS nations have active pilot programs for Central Bank Digital Currencies (such as the digital yuan, digital rupee, and digital real). Under proposals championed by the Reserve Bank of India, the group is evaluating the legal and technical parameters needed to bridge these independent CBDCs, making wholesale cross-border trade settlements instant and friction-free.
Despite political rumors, India and other key members explicitly ruled out a monolithic “BRICS common currency”. During the 2026 Summit, members chose to formally “acknowledge” the work of the BRICS Payment Task Force (BPTF) rather than mandate a single architecture. The consensus respects national priorities and avoids a “one-size-fits-all” framework, leaving nations free to advance along parallel technical tracks (e.g., India connecting UPI with Russia’s grid, while China scales CIPS.
Glenn Diesen, in conversation today with Bhadrakumar, makes the important observation that India is a founding BRICS member that, in conjunction with Russia, can ensure that the new economic architecture which the BRICS represents is not going to be dominated by China. Not lease because India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Bhadrakumar talks at length as to the weaknesses of official Indian understanding of the origins of the war over Ukraine, but can see a process of convergence of perspective between Putin and Modi, very much along the lines (if you would please indulge me) that I have outlined time and time again in these postings over the past four plus years, and helped along by Russia’s role in helping ensure a continuing flow of Russian oil and Russian fertilizers to India. Bhadrakumar also refers to Russia’s recent historical experience with extreme Islamist jihadis in Chechnya, providing a shared experience with terrorism which Russia holds in common with China – in the context of jihadi terrorism within the Uighur population, which Western propaganda has twisted into a totally false narrative of Chinese “genocide” of Uighurs which I have demolished in previous posts; and in the contexts of terrorism against Chinese Belt and Road initiatives in Mynmar and Pakistan (Balochistan) among many other instances.