Bharat Mandapam hosts the New World Order
New Delhi, 12 September Bharat Mandapam has a particular look on a summit morning. The flags go up before the traffic does. By the time the first motorcade turns in, the convention centre in Pragati Maidan is already the busiest square kilometre in the country. On 12 September 2026 it becomes, for two days, the meeting place of eleven economies that between them hold about half the world’s people.
The 18th BRICS Summit opens here today and runs through 13 September, under India’s chairship and the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”. Akashvani News reported on the morning of 12 September 2026 that the day begins with a closed session for member countries on inclusive global governance and the strengthening of multilateralism, followed by a visit to the Bharat Innovates exhibition, a joint tree-planting and a dinner hosted by the Prime Minister.
Eleven countries now sit at the table: Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the UAE. According to the Press Information Bureau’s research backgrounder on BRICS, posted on 10 September 2026, they account for 49.5% of the world’s population, 40% of global GDP and 26% of global trade.
India came to the chair on 1 January 2026 and has run it hard. The same PIB backgrounder records more than 350 meetings and high-level engagements across 25 cities during the chairship year — a number that says more about intent than any communiqué will. Out of them came a customs cooperation agreement members have approved in principle, a standardisation memorandum signed by the heads of the national standards bodies, a startup innovation fund, an incubator network and an MSME cooperation portal.
This is India’s fourth chairship, after Delhi in 2012, Goa in 2016 and the virtual summit of 2021. Each left something behind. The 2012 Delhi Declaration proposed what became the New Development Bank. Goa secured the grouping’s language on terrorism and its adherence to Financial Action Task Force standards. The 2021 summit produced the counter-terrorism action plan and the remote sensing satellite constellation agreement.
What India gains
What the nation gains from the fourth turn is narrower and more useful than prestige. A standards memorandum signed by eleven national standards bodies is the difference between an Indian pharmaceutical consignment clearing a port in Addis Ababa and sitting in it. A customs agreement is the difference between a nine-day clearance and a three-day one. These are the unglamorous instruments on which export earnings actually turn, and they are the ones India has spent the year building.
The summit closes on 13 September with the New Delhi Declaration. Its text is not yet published, and Blitz will report it from the document itself.
PM Modi backs Open Sea routes
New Delhi, 12 September PM Modi chose the least abstract subject available to him. Speaking at the Leaders’ Session of the BRICS Business Forum at Bharat Mandapam on the evening of 11 September, the PM called for secure sea lanes, open supply routes and the safety of seafarers, and said India was a strong advocate of freedom of navigation.
For a country that moves the overwhelming bulk of its trade by sea and supplies a large share of the world’s merchant crew, that is not a diplomatic flourish. It is a statement about wages sent home to Goa, Kerala and Maharashtra.
According to the Akashvani News report of 12 September 2026, the Prime Minister said India had entered into free trade agreements with nearly 40 countries since 2014, and that its approach within BRICS was the same — fewer barriers, more room for business. He put it as three instructions: make in India, innovate with India, scale for the world.
He also gave the grouping its arithmetic. BRICS countries now account for 50% of the world’s population, 40% of global GDP and more than 25% of global trade, he said. Over the past two decades world GDP has grown by about 2.5 times; the combined GDP of BRICS countries has grown by about 4.5 times.
The Prime Minister pointed to three instruments built during India’s chairship year and aimed squarely at the smaller firm: the BRICS Incubator Network, the BRICS MSME Cooperation Portal and the BRICS Startup Innovation Fund. A Coimbatore pump-maker with a buyer in Jakarta has never lacked a product. It has lacked a registration route and a line of credit that survives the shipping period.
Russian President Vladimir Putin told the same session that more than 40% of world GDP has been produced by BRICS countries over the last five years, and that their domestic markets are what give the grouping its weight. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian pressed for wider use of national currencies in intra-BRICS trade, with instruments to manage currency risk alongside it. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the Global South must lead in manufacturing, technology and value creation.
BRICS exports hit top gear
New Delhi, 12 September Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal told the Leaders’ Session of the BRICS Business Forum on 11 September 2026 that exports from BRICS countries have risen from about $900 billion in 2003 to $6 trillion in 2024.
Blitz has recomputed the growth that figure implies. Over the 21 years from 2003 to 2024 the increase is 6.67 times, a compound annual growth rate of 9.45%. The derivation is straightforward — the 21st root of 6.67, less one — and it is printed here because a headline multiple tells a reader nothing about pace.
A bloc compounding its exports at nine and a half per cent a year for two decades has already solved the tariff problem for most of what it sells. What it has not solved is everything that happens after the tariff: the conformity certificate that is not recognised across the border, the port inspection repeated at both ends, the packaging standard written for somebody else’s market. That is why the agenda at this Forum ran to non-tariff barriers, agriculture and agri-technology, services trade, women-led enterprises and the digital economy.
The Minister said India’s chairship has been driven by a clear purpose — more balanced trade among member nations, and the expansion of trade in services across the bloc. He said the cooperation must reach farmers, women in business, young entrepreneurs and micro, small and medium enterprises, who form the backbone of the BRICS economies.
It was, he said, the largest BRICS Business Forum ever held, with more than 2,000 business leaders and delegates from member and partner countries.
Services is the limb worth watching from an Indian desk. India runs a services surplus that has repeatedly cushioned its merchandise deficit, and no BRICS instrument has yet opened services the way the customs and standards work is opening goods. A services chapter would be the single most valuable thing this chairship could hand to its successor.
Dialogue, diplomacy and strategic ties
New Delhi, 12 September Prime Minister Narendra Modi held three bilateral meetings in New Delhi on 11 September 2026, the evening before the summit: with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.
With the Russian President, according to the Akashvani News report of 12 September 2026, the two leaders reviewed politics, trade and economy, defence, energy, space, skill mobility and people-to-people ties, and exchanged views on the conflicts in West Asia and the Black Sea region. The Prime Minister repeated that dialogue and diplomacy are the way forward, and said India stood ready to assist peace efforts.
President Putin invited the Prime Minister to Russia for the 24th India-Russia Annual Summit. The invitation was accepted; the dates are to be settled by mutual convenience.
One detail from that meeting is worth more than it looks. The Prime Minister gave the Russian President a Russian translation of the Thirukkural, the Tamil classic of Thiruvalluvar, published by the Central Institute of Classical Tamil. A two-thousand-year-old Tamil text, rendered into Russian by an Indian institution and handed over at a summit, is cultural diplomacy done with something India actually owns.
In the meeting with the Iranian President, the Prime Minister discussed bilateral relations and developments in West Asia, and returned to the seafarers. He underlined freedom of navigation and commerce and the safety and well-being of crews — the same thread he carried into the Business Forum that evening.
With the United Nations Secretary-General, the subjects were global conflicts, freedom of navigation, sustainable development, renewable energy, global food security and human-centric artificial intelligence, together with the reform of international institutions including the Security Council. Mr Guterres congratulated the Prime Minister on India taking the BRICS chairship for the fourth time.
What India gains from an evening of this kind is standing of a specific sort: the capacity to hold a conversation with Moscow, Tehran and the United Nations on the same day, in the same building, without any of the three treating the other two as a reason to decline.
iBRICS brings global wealth to Delhi
New Delhi, 12 September Alongside the leaders’ meeting, a second summit runs at a different pitch. The inaugural iBRICS Summit, held on 12 and 13 September 2026, brings together more than 500 institutional investors, finance ministers and business leaders.
According to Akashvani News, the sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and family offices attending manage a combined $1 trillion. Blitz has recomputed the average that implies: about $2 billion of managed wealth for each of the 500 participants. The figure is an average and conceals a wide spread, but it fixes the order of magnitude of the room.
The summit is designed to connect sovereign capital with bankable infrastructure, energy and digital capacity projects across 21 BRICS member and partner states. The word that carries the weight there is bankable. India’s constraint has rarely been the absence of projects; it has been the absence of projects packaged to a standard a pension fund’s investment committee can approve without a year of due diligence.
Discussions cover cross-border investment, non-dollar settlement and payment systems, and the linking of national fast-payment systems — India’s Unified Payments Interface and Brazil’s Pix among them — along with interoperability between central bank digital currencies.
A UPI-Pix link would matter first to the smallest users. An Indian student in São Paulo, a Brazilian buyer paying a Tiruppur garment exporter, a remittance from a seafarer: each currently pays a correspondent-banking toll for a transaction that two domestic systems could settle in seconds.
The meeting comes as BRICS economies adjust to shifting trade patterns, tariff pressure and high dollar-clearing costs. Blitz records that the iBRICS participation figures were published by the national broadcaster on 6 September 2026, ahead of the event; the final attendance will be reported from the organisers’ own record.
Google Earth meets Government Audit
New Delhi, 12 September Somewhere in the Green India Mission audit is a sentence that should change how every Indian development programme is examined. The Comptroller and Auditor General did not take the states’ plantation returns on trust. It went and looked.
In Report No. 4 of 2026, a performance audit on the Green India Mission tabled in Parliament on 12 August 2026, the CAG records that Audit independently evaluated the Mission’s performance reports by visiting plantation areas with a GPS device, viewing the KML files of plantation sites on Google Earth Pro, and engaging the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, to conduct temporal analysis of the imagery. Of the locations assessed across nine states, the report states that about 70% showed no noticeable change attributable to Mission interventions between 2016-17 and 2019-20, as assessed up to 2024.
The Mission itself is one of the eight core missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change. The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved it in February 2014 as a centrally sponsored scheme, with afforestation over 2.8 million hectares in four years at an estimated ₹13,000 crore, of which ₹10,600 crore was to come through convergence with the compensatory afforestation fund, the rural employment guarantee scheme and the National Afforestation Programme.
The report records that the convergence did not materialise, and that against the outlay approved for the scheme, ₹1,149.14 crore, or 47.88%, was received through budgetary support across ten years from 2015-16 to 2024-25. Blitz has independently recomputed that ratio against the approved outlay of ₹2,000 crore from the Twelfth Plan and ₹400 crore from Thirteenth Finance Commission grants: 1,149.14 divided by 2,400 is 47.88%. The auditor’s arithmetic reproduces exactly, which is itself a verified finding.
Against the approved target of 2.8 million hectares, the report states that interventions were made on 0.14793 million hectares up to March 2025. Blitz computes that as 5.28% of the target. Dividing the budgetary support actually received by the area actually treated gives about ₹77,684 a hectare — a figure the report does not print, and one that sets a floor under any future costing of afforestation at scale.
The national picture is better than the Mission’s own. The report notes that India’s forest and tree cover rose from 24.62% in the India State of Forest Report 2021 to 25.17% in the 2023 edition, an increase of 0.55 percentage points. The National Forest Policy goal is 33%, which leaves 7.83 points to cover.
Two states come out of the audit well and deserve saying so. Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh were the only states to have assessed carbon sequestration on treated areas during 2015-2025; Mizoram and Uttarakhand were the only two where Gram Sabha social audits were conducted at all, intermittently though it was. A demonstration that a thing can be done is the most useful material in any audit.
The Ministry adopted a new afforestation target of 25 million hectares in 2021, to be achieved by 2030 and aligned to India’s commitment under the Paris Agreement to an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. The report records that implementation guidelines for that target had not been framed as of September 2025.
What India gains
An audit institution that can check a forestry claim with satellite imagery and an institute partnership can check a road, a canal or a housing scheme the same way, and at a fraction of the cost of a field inspection. That capability, built inside the CAG during this audit, will outlast the Mission it was built to examine.
India leads BRICS research networks
New Delhi, 12 September The communiqués will be read for the geopolitics. The more durable part of India’s BRICS year is a handful of research networks, and Indian laboratories have been given the coordinating chair of several of them.
The Press Information Bureau’s research backgrounder on BRICS, posted on 10 September 2026, sets out what the ministerial meetings of the chairship year produced. The BRICS Centres of Excellence on Agro-Ecology, a joint platform for research and capacity building on natural, organic and regenerative farming, will initially be coordinated by the ICAR-Indian Institute of Farming Systems Research at Modipuram. The BRICS Network on Digital Agriculture, covering artificial-intelligence decision-support systems, geospatial intelligence, sensor-based monitoring and data analytics in farming, will initially be coordinated by IIT Delhi.
Naming Modipuram matters. It is a working farming-systems institute in western Uttar Pradesh, not a committee address, and the practices it studies — cropping systems, residue management, soil health on smallholdings — are the practices a farmer in Meerut district recognises.
On health, the backgrounder records the BRICS Mission for Healthy Lifestyle and a roadmap for 2026-2029 aimed at obesity and other non-communicable diseases; an expert working group on traditional, complementary and integrative medicine covering research, regulatory standards and the protection of indigenous knowledge; and a mental-health strand built on a BRICS Training Hub Network and centres of excellence, with NIMHANS as the coordinating centre.
NIMHANS coordinating an eleven-country mental-health training network is the single most under-noticed line in the whole backgrounder. India has a severe shortage of trained mental-health professionals relative to need; a network whose stated purpose is upskilling, task-sharing and standardised training, and integrating mental well-being into primary healthcare, is aimed at exactly that shortage.
Three further instruments run alongside: a BRICS Science and Research Repository for shared storage of scientific knowledge, a BRICS Incubator Network linking national nodal agencies and incubators for cross-border start-up referrals, and the AGRIN framework on seeds, germplasm and agricultural inputs, described as voluntary and farmer-centric.
Sitharaman’s fintech mantra
New Delhi, 12 September Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman told the Global Fintech Festival 2026 that India should pursue technological innovation at scale, but without compromising human responsibility, safety and public trust.
It is a deliberately awkward pairing of ideas, and the awkwardness is the point. Scale and caution pull against each other in every payments system, and a finance minister saying so in front of a fintech audience is choosing the harder message.
Addressing the festival in Mumbai on 11 September 2026, the Finance Minister said India’s demographic dividend is visible in the rapidly growing fintech ecosystem, and that the country’s young generation was not waiting for opportunities.
The trust argument has a specific Indian context. A payments system carrying very large volumes of very small transactions is only as strong as the confidence of the person sending ₹200 to a vegetable seller. Every fraud that reaches a newspaper costs more adoption than any campaign buys.
What Indians gain from getting this balance right is the continued cheapness of digital payment. India’s retail digital rails are among the least expensive in the world for the end user, and that is a consumer subsidy delivered through design rather than through the budget.
India’s Fintech future gets connected
New Delhi, 12 September Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said the country’s fintech revolution is inseparable from its connectivity revolution, speaking on the third day of the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai on 10 September 2026.
He pointed to the emergence of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and quantum cryptography as the technologies that will shape what comes next, and said connectivity and trust are both needed for digital finance to grow.
The observation is obvious and routinely forgotten. A payment application is a thin layer on top of a tower, a fibre span and a spectrum allocation. Where the tower is missing, the application is a picture on a screen.
For Indians, the practical consequence is that the remaining gains in digital finance are geographic rather than technological. The interfaces are built; what is not yet built, in parts of the North East, the hill districts and the deeper rural blocks, is the network that makes them work at the moment a transaction is attempted.
Goyal calls for accelerated India-Russia ties
New Delhi, 12 September Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal called for an accelerated India-Russia economic and industrial partnership, with the two countries working towards $100 billion in bilateral trade and $50 billion in two-way investment by 2030. He was addressing INNOPROM on 10 September 2026.
The investment number is the one to watch. Trade between the two countries has been dominated in recent years by a narrow band of commodities, and a commodity relationship is vulnerable to a single price move. Two-way investment of $50 billion would mean factories, joint ventures and service contracts — the kind of relationship that survives a bad year in the energy market.
The target sits against a fuller agenda. In their meeting in New Delhi on 11 September 2026 the Prime Minister and the Russian President reviewed cooperation in politics, trade and economy, defence, energy, space, skill mobility and people-to-people ties.
Skill mobility deserves separating out from that list. An agreed framework for Indian workers and professionals in Russia is worth a measurable amount in remittances and in experience brought home, and it is the limb of the relationship most directly felt in an Indian household.
ASSOCHAM backs Modi’s BRICS vision
New Delhi, 12 September The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India welcomed the Prime Minister’s vision for strengthening BRICS as a platform for global cooperation and a stronger voice for the Global South, in a statement reported on 11 September 2026.
ASSOCHAM President Nirmal K Minda framed the chamber’s support around the conversion of BRICS cooperation into concrete business outcomes.
Industry bodies are not neutral observers, and their statements are read accordingly. This one is worth noting for a narrower reason: it names the conversion problem. Every multilateral grouping produces frameworks faster than it produces transactions, and the gap between the two is where credibility is won or lost.
For Indian industry the conversion test at this summit is specific and answerable. Does the customs agreement shorten a clearance? Does the standards memorandum remove a duplicate test? Does the MSME portal produce a first order for a firm that did not previously export? Those three questions can be answered with data within a year, and Blitz intends to ask them.
Domestic indices trade lower
New Delhi, 12 September Benchmark domestic equity indices were lower on 11 September 2026, in what Akashvani News reported as a third consecutive session of decline. The indices pared their early losses in the last hour of trade, and when reports last came in the Sensex was down 55 points at 74,848 and the Nifty 53 points at 23,425. These are the levels as the bulletin carried them, not a settled close.
In the foreign exchange market the rupee depreciated by 10 paise to close at 95 rupees and 55 paise against the US dollar.
In the bullion market 24 carat gold fell 0.9% to ₹1,51,938 per 10 grams, while silver dropped 2% to ₹2,28,920 per kilogram.
A 2% fall in silver on the day before a summit on supply chains is a small reminder of how tightly the metal now tracks industrial demand rather than sentiment. Silver is a solar-panel and electronics input before it is a store of value, and Indian households holding it are, without having chosen to, holding a bet on manufacturing.
Blitz records that these are closing levels reported by the national broadcaster and not exchange settlement data; the settlement figures, with their own settlement date, govern any commercial use.
