Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI:India is chairing BRICS in the year the grouping turns twenty. The scholars who write the summit’s intellectual agenda are meeting this week — not in New Delhi, but in Lucknow. That choice is the story.
The 18th BRICS Academic Forum opened in Lucknow on 23 August 2026 and runs until 25 August, convened by the Observer Research Foundation with the Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS) and the University of Lucknow, as part of India’s BRICS chairship. Its theme is “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”. Over three days, academics, researchers and policymakers from the member states will work through resilience in economic, social, health and climate systems; innovation through start-ups, MSMEs, science and talent mobility; cooperation on artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and digital public infrastructure; and the reform of global governance.
The Academic Forum is the least glamorous fixture in the BRICS calendar and, on the record of the past decade, the most consequential. It is the track where propositions are stress-tested a year or two before they surface in a leaders’ declaration. The New Development Bank, local-currency settlement, the contingent reserve arrangement and the grouping’s digital-payments conversation all began life as academic-track papers. What the Forum produces is a set of recommendations that feed the Sherpa process and, eventually, the summit text. Which is why the 2026 edition carries more weight than most: this is the year BRICS marks twenty years of cooperation, and the year India holds the chair.
The grouping at twenty. BRICS leaders at the 17th Summit family photograph in 2025. India holds the chairship through 2026, and the academic track meeting in Lucknow this week writes the first draft of what the leaders will eventually be asked to sign.
A summit declaration is written twice. The second time in a capital, with cameras. The first time in a seminar room, without them.
At a Glance
• Event: 18th BRICS Academic Forum, Lucknow, 23–25 August 2026
• Convened by: Observer Research Foundation, with RIS and the University of Lucknow
• Theme: “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”
• Occasion: India’s BRICS chairship; the grouping’s twentieth year of cooperation
• Agenda: resilience, innovation, emerging technologies, global governance reform
• Emerging-tech focus: artificial intelligence, quantum, digital public infrastructure
• Feeds into: the Sherpa track and the leaders’ summit declaration
Holding it in Lucknow rather than New Delhi is a deliberate act, and it is worth reading correctly. India’s international convening has historically concentrated in three cities, and the effect has been to keep the country’s largest state universities outside the room where its foreign policy is discussed. The University of Lucknow is a co-convener here, not a venue. That means doctoral students in Uttar Pradesh spend three days in the same sessions as delegates from Brasília, Moscow, Beijing, Pretoria and the newer members — an apprenticeship that no scholarship scheme buys as efficiently. The G20 presidency established the template by scattering more than two hundred meetings across fifty-odd cities; this is that template applied to a grouping where India has more room to shape the agenda.
The substance on the table is also more Indian than the label suggests. Digital public infrastructure is the clearest instance: India built identity, payments and data-sharing as public rails rather than private platforms, and the question the Forum will examine is whether that architecture is exportable to economies with weaker state capacity and different privacy law. On artificial intelligence, the developing-world argument is not about frontier models but about compute access, language coverage and whether AI governance will be written by the countries that host the data centres or the countries that supply the data. On quantum, the practical question is standards. None of these has a settled answer, and that is precisely what an academic track is for.
The way forward is procedural, and India has an opportunity the chair does not always get. Academic-track recommendations disappear unless somebody is accountable for carrying them into the Sherpa process; the editions that mattered were the ones where the host published the recommendations, named the working groups that would take them up, and reported back at the mid-term conference. India has the institutional depth to do all three — RIS as the designated think tank, ORF as convener, and a chairship year still running. The test of Lucknow will not be the closing session on Tuesday. It will be how much of what is argued this week is still legible in the declaration the leaders eventually sign.
