Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: The leaders meet in September. The work that decides what they sign is happening in Delhi now — in a civil society forum and an environment officials’ meeting most of the coverage will skip.
India took over the BRICS chairship at the start of 2026 — the fourth time it has held it, after 2012, 2016 and 2021 — and will host the eighteenth summit in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”. The grouping the summit will convene is not the one India last chaired. It now runs to ten full members: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia, alongside a partner tier of ten more — Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
Two of those tracks met in Delhi this week. The BRICS Civil Forum 2026 was opened by the Ministry of External Affairs Secretary handling economic relations, who told delegates the forum’s inputs would be valuable to the leaders’ summit later this year. Separately, the Secretary of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Tanmay Kumar, welcomed member-state delegations to the environment working group’s senior officials’ meeting.
Before September: sherpa meetings, working groups and the civil forum do the drafting. By the time leaders arrive in Delhi on 12 September, most of the text is settled.
Twenty countries now sit inside BRICS in one capacity or another. A summit communique that twenty capitals can accept is written in August, not in September.
At a Glance
• Chair: India, 2026 — its fourth chairship after 2012, 2016 and 2021
• Summit: 18th BRICS Summit, New Delhi, 12–13 September 2026
• Theme: Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability
• Full members: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, UAE, Indonesia
• Partner countries: Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vietnam
• This week in Delhi: BRICS Civil Forum 2026; environment working group senior officials’ meeting
• Environment track host: MoEFCC Secretary Tanmay Kumar
• Logo, theme and website: launched 13 January 2026
The reason the preparatory calendar deserves attention is arithmetical. Twenty countries now sit inside BRICS as members or partners, spanning three continents, four currencies of consequence and every possible position on trade and energy. A communique that twenty capitals can accept is not negotiated over two days in September; it is assembled through sherpa rounds and sectoral working groups across the year, and by the time heads of government arrive the substantive text is largely closed. The civil forum matters for the same reason — it is the channel through which non-governmental positions enter that text while it is still being drafted.
For India the chairship is an opportunity of a specific kind. The country has built, at domestic scale, the things much of this grouping is trying to build: a real-time retail payments system, a digital identity layer, a public health delivery stack, and the world’s third-largest installed renewable capacity. Chairing the year lets India offer those as reference implementations rather than as arguments. The task between now and 12 September is to convert that credibility into a small number of deliverables the summit can actually adopt — on payments interoperability, on climate finance for the Global South, on the partner-country framework. Fewer, sharper outcomes travel further than a long communique, and India has the pen.
