Executive Summary
BRICS is big, growing, and still figuring out what it actually is. Eleven members. 40% of global GDP at purchasing power parity. A development bank with $40 billion deployed. Yet dollar dependency, an unbridgeable India-China divide, and zero binding commitments cap how much of that weight it can actually throw. Scale without structure is not leverage. It is potential, unrealised.
BRICS is expanding faster than anyone can define it. By mid-2025, the bloc counted 11 full members, 9 partner countries, and 32 nations that had expressed interest in joining. 20 years ago it was a Goldman Sachs shorthand for four fast-growing economies. Today it is something Western capitals did not plan for: a crowded room, more people at the door, most of them not particularly interested in what Washington is offering.
Nobody seriously disputes that BRICS is growing.
The harder question is whether that growth translates into anything resembling institutional weight, whether this bloc can genuinely rival the IMF, the World Bank, the G7, or the dollar architecture it keeps proposing to replace. Membership numbers and summit communiques do not answer that. The internal mechanics do.
Key Takeaways
- BRICS now has 11 full members covering an estimated 40% of global GDP (at PPP) and 45% of world population, per IMF World Economic Outlook 2025.
- The New Development Bank has approved financing of approximately $40 billion across 122 projects since 2016, per NDB data as of July 2025.
- A single BRICS currency remains unlikely in the near term due to internal divisions and structural dollar dependency.
- India and China hold fundamentally different visions for where BRICS should go, limiting unified action.
- 32 nations expressed interest in joining as of mid-2025, with 23 having filed formal membership applications, signalling broad Global South interest.
- BRICS operates alongside Western-led financial architecture, supplementing rather than replacing it.
What Actually Changed Since 2023
Johannesburg 2023 is where the expansion became structural. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE were invited at the Johannesburg summit in August 2023 and formally joined on 1 January 2024. Indonesia followed on 6 January 2025. Saudi Arabia, whose formal membership status remains officially contested, is counted among the 11 by BRICS sources. The bloc now holds a geographic footprint across the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia that did not exist three years ago.
The additions carry real strategic weight. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE inside the bloc means BRICS now controls a substantial share of global oil and gas production.
Combined member central banks hold a significant share of global foreign exchange reserves; various estimates put the combined figure above 40%. The 2025 Rio summit, under Brazil's presidency, was the first to convene the full expanded membership, with over 100 ministerial-level meetings logged through the year. That is not a talking shop. That is infrastructure.
Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Thailand attend as partner countries, short of full membership. The Global South is not waiting for permission anymore.
Western analysts spent years measuring BRICS against the EU and calling it structurally deficient: no institutional density, no binding obligations, no enforcement architecture. Wrong frame entirely. Countries join precisely because none of that exists. No conditionality. No alignment test. No sanctions risk for hedging between Washington and Beijing at the same time.
The New Development Bank: Real Progress, Real Limits
Of everything BRICS has actually built, the New Development Bank is the most concrete, and the most instructive test of whether the bloc can deliver beyond declarations. It has approved financing of approximately $40 billion across 122 projects since 2016.
In early 2026 the NDB reportedly entered advanced talks with India's Reserve Bank over its first rupee-denominated bond issuance in the domestic market. Local currency lending. No unified currency framework required. That is the practical workaround nobody announces at summits but everyone keeps quietly building.
No conditionalities on NDB loans, either. For governments that spent decades navigating IMF structural adjustment terms and resenting every clause, that distinction is substantive, not cosmetic.
Ukraine 2022 exposed the actual floor. The NDB suspended Russian transactions within weeks because no other member would sacrifice dollar-market access for solidarity. The Contingent Reserve Arrangement, which BRICS positioned as an IMF alternative for emergency liquidity, still requires IMF programme approval before most funds can move.
The crisis confirmed limits that were already there. Until the NDB can lend without IMF linkage during a live geopolitical crisis, it is not a parallel system. It is a supplementary one. That gap matters most to the countries that most need it to close.
The Dollar Problem Nobody Has Solved
No topic inside BRICS generates more noise or less result than de-dollarization. Russia has pressed it hardest since 2022, for reasons that need no explanation. Beijing has thrown its weight behind BRICS Pay and the BRICS Bridge as local currency settlement infrastructure. Yet the commodity-backed BRICS currency? It gets raised at every summit and departs every summit exactly where it arrived.
India has not been subtle about where it stands. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said in 2025: "I do not believe we have any policy to have a replacement to the dollar. Global economic stability is pegged on the dollar as the reserve currency." Not diplomatic hedging. The official position of BRICS' second-largest economy, unchanged and showing no sign of changing.
On the ground, de-dollarization edges forward through bilateral settlement deals and scattered local currency arrangements. Nothing remotely approaching a bloc-wide mechanism.
Trump added friction by threatening higher tariffs on any country actively working to displace the dollar through BRICS channels. Still, the deeper issue is this: for most BRICS members, the dollar is not a problem to eliminate. It is a system to hedge against. That distinction explains everything about why de-dollarization keeps getting raised and never gets done.
The India-China Fault Line Inside the Bloc
The most consequential fault line inside BRICS has nothing to do with Washington. New Delhi and Beijing are where it runs, and it runs deep. China wants a weapon. India wants a reform committee. Those are not different visions of the same organisation. They are different organisations wearing the same name.
Beijing and Moscow want the bloc to openly contest Western institutional dominance, push de-dollarization hard, and function as an anti-hegemonic coalition in everything but official name.
India wants none of that. More representation for emerging economies inside existing institutions, not a bonfire of them. New Delhi will not sign up for an explicitly anti-Western platform that forces a choice between BRICS and its partnerships with Washington, Brussels, and the Quad. No summit communique fixes that gap. It is structural.
The July 2025 Rio summit offered its own signals. Xi Jinping skipped it, his first absence since becoming China's leader in 2013. An ICC arrest warrant kept Putin to a video link. Brazil steered the agenda firmly toward green industrialisation and climate finance, cutting out the anti-Western posturing that defined earlier gatherings. The political temperature fell even as the membership rolls grew.
BRICS today looks less like a rival institution and more like a waiting room where the two biggest patients disagree about what they came in for. More members means more divergent interests and less capacity for coordinated action on anything genuinely contested.
What This Means / Why It Matters
Across much of the Global South, BRICS matters less as a rival architecture than as a negotiating posture. Governments that spent years with nowhere else to go now have somewhere else to point. That alone changes the dynamic at the table, even if the option never gets fully used.
India sits in the most complicated position of any member. Strategic autonomy has held up because Washington and Beijing have both competed for New Delhi's partnership without demanding a definitive answer. That room is getting smaller. India is avoiding the core question of what BRICS is actually for. That avoidance will not hold.
Western institutions would do well to read the NDB's rise as a governance warning rather than a competitive threat. The IMF and World Bank have carried unresolved reform mandates since the mid-2000s. BRICS did not predict that vacuum. It simply moved into it.
So What Next?
Expansion will continue regardless of whether the internal contradictions get resolved. Nigeria and Angola are the strongest candidates for the next admission round. Malaysia, Turkey, and Vietnam are among the 32 nations that expressed interest in joining. Meanwhile, the membership roster will outrun the governance architecture by a significant margin, and no one inside the bloc is moving to stop it.
Watch the NDB's rupee bond issuance more closely than any summit outcome. If local currency lending at scale proves workable, it opens a credible route to reduced dollar exposure without waiting on a BRICS currency agreement that shows no sign of arriving. A functioning instrument beats a declaration every time.
Everything runs through the India-China variable. Relations thawed after the border standoffs, but the strategic competition underneath has not. One serious deterioration sends BRICS back to what it has always risked being: a summit circuit with a development bank attached.
Editorial View · Santhosh Vishwamitra
BRICS Is Asking the Right Question. It Has Not Found the Right Answer Yet.
BRICS is not a revolution. A renegotiation is the more accurate word. At its core, the bloc is a long-overdue pushback from countries that spent decades being told the Washington Consensus was the only viable path. Given the IMF's conditionality record, patchy and long enough to fill several books, the NDB required no marketing campaign.
Demand is not the problem. The gap between demand and delivery is. BRICS has scale, not structure. The India-China divide cannot be worked around by better wording at summits. It is a disagreement about what this organisation is fundamentally supposed to be doing, and until that gets resolved, everything else is noise.
Where BRICS has genuinely moved the needle is the negotiating environment. Governments that had no alternative now have one, even if they never fully deploy it. Knowing there is somewhere else to go changes the tone of every conversation with the IMF, the World Bank, and Washington. Writing the bloc off as institutionally incoherent misses that entirely. You can be incoherent and still shift the terms of a conversation.
The Bottom Line
BRICS is growing like a coalition of power. It still operates like a coalition of hesitation. Every new member makes the bloc larger and the core question harder to avoid.
Our Approach
We aim to present global events with clarity, accuracy, and balance -- without taking sides. Every article is based on credible sources and verified information.
We do not follow the "breaking news" race. Instead, we focus on delivering thoughtful analysis and meaningful perspective on important developments.
If you notice any errors, feel free to reach out. We follow a transparent correction and update policy to ensure all changes are clearly reflected for our readers.
Comments
Post a Comment