Pacific Money | Economy | South Asia

The New Development Bank Quietly Delivers During India’s BRICS Year

India is in a unique position as a founding member and one of its biggest borrowers.

The headquarters of the New Development Bank in Shanghai, China.

As India hosted the BRICS summit in New Delhi in September 2026, a familiar question returned: does the grouping produce anything beyond summit statements? The New Development Bank (NDB) offers the clearest evidence in the affirmative. India first proposed the bank at an earlier BRICS summit in New Delhi in 2012, and its 2026 chairship of BRICS brought that idea full circle. 

Judging a development bank is not simple; big announcements matter less than the money that actually reaches projects. The NDB’s record can thus be evaluated on three broad counts. The first is how much it has lent and how much of that money has actually been paid out. The second is whom the bank lends to. The third is how it raises the money it lends. On all three, the picture is more encouraging than the NDB’s low public profile suggests. 

By the end of June 2026, the NDB had approved loans worth about $44 billion for 141 projects in clean energy, transport, water systems and digital infrastructure. Of that amount, roughly $25 billion had already been paid out to borrowers. The second figure is especially important. Many development banks approve large loans but pay out much less, and much more slowly. A bank that has paid out more than half of what it approved is doing real work, not just signing agreements. 

The NDB’s public figures show what this money is building: 2,400 megawatts of clean energy capacity under way, 1,400 kilometers of tunnels and canals, 43 schools built or upgraded and a large increase in sewage treatment capacity. 

The bank’s reach has also grown. Its founding members were Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. It has since added Algeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan. Its members now stretch from South and Central Asia to Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. 

India’s place in the NDB is unusual. It helped create the bank, it owns an equal share of it, and it is one of its biggest borrowers. Each founding member holds about 18.7 percent of the bank’s capital. This was designed so that no single country could control it. Even so, India has used the bank’s loans more than most members. 

Since 2016 the bank has approved 32 initiatives for India, worth close to $9.5 billion, in transport, social development, and clean energy. Lending has continued into 2026 also. Recent approvals include a $300 million clean energy project involving REC Limited and an affordable housing project backed by the Housing and Urban Development Corporation........

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