As India hosts BRICS’s 18th summit, the grouping’s true significance sits somewhere between the hype and the scepticism surrounding it. The need now is to look at BRICS’s relevance for India and the Global South, assessing the past 20 years of its existence to determine what it must do to become the bloc it was intended to be.

The BRICS summit 2026 in Delhi comes at a time of unceasing rounds of US tariff threats and a fragile India-China thaw. On the same dates as the summit, Delhi will host iBRICS, a related but separate meeting of sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and family offices with a combined portfolio of $1 trillion. A single chair managing such events concurrently is certainly rare.

The question to ask about BRICS is: What is its ground reality? Is it merely one of narratives or does the grouping have real impact to show?

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There are also other unanswered questions regarding the grouping’s goals, mechanisms, and outcomes on the financial front, especially on BRICS Cross Border Payments (BRICS Pay) and de-dollarisation in BRICS countries. The latter seems more like speculation than an articulated goal so far, even though the bloc has existed for 20 years.

iBRICS is worth careful thought — the event has claimed a fair share of the spotlight........

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