The New Delhi Declaration closed the 18th Summit with pledges on tariffs, terrorism and AI. It said nothing about the bill India is actually paying to trade with the bloc it just hosted
By Purna Chandra Jena
The 18th BRICS Summit closed at Bharat Mandapam on 13 September, with leaders unanimously adopting the 140-point New Delhi Declaration. It backs India and Brazil for larger UN roles, condemns the Pahalgam terror attack, demands a Gaza ceasefire, opposes unilateral tariffs and secondary sanctions, commits to a Leaders’ Statement on AI governance, launches a BRICS Risk Lab at GIFT City, and makes room for big-cat conservation. By any measure, it is a substantial document. It contains no figures on the actual cost to India of trading with BRICS+. That silence is the real headline.
Even the theatre needed managing. Opposition leaders accused the government of screening off slum clusters along summit transit routes with green curtains — a small, telling metaphor for a gathering considerably better at managing appearances than at managing accounts. The declaration’s 140 points cover terrorism, tariffs and technology in granular detail. The figure that would have told India’s own citizens what this chairship cost them does not appear anywhere in it.
Here is that number, drawn from GTRI’s own analysis of DGCIS data: India’s trade deficit with the eleven-nation bloc it just hosted stood at $226.1 billion in FY2026 — more than double its $108.2 billion deficit with the rest of the world combined. A grouping supplying barely a fifth of India’s exports accounts for 68% of its total trade shortfall.
The summit’s own growth figures explain why this matters. BRICS+ is expanding by 3.8% this year, nearly four times the G7’s 1.0%, led by India at 6.6-6.8% and China at 4.8%, while Brazil, Russia and South Africa average barely above 1%. On a PPP basis, BRICS-11 now holds 41.0% of global GDP against the G7’s 28.0%, a crossover dating back to 2018. But BRICS-11 also holds 49.0% of the world’s population against the G7’s 9.8%, and its nominal per-capita income, $8,916, is barely an eighth of the G7’s $70,165 — a gap that narrows to roughly threefold even at purchasing power parity. Scale, once again, is not prosperity.
None of that stopped the bloc from scaling trade, because BRICS+ runs on complementarity, not competition: the Finger-Kreinin and Relative Export Competitive Pressure indices show bilateral overlap under 0.3 and 0.2 across most pairs, with India’s pharmaceuticals and IT services fitting neatly alongside China’s electronics, Russia’s hydrocarbons and Brazil’s agri-commodities. But China alone accounts for 64% of the bloc’s exports, against India’s 9%, and the bloc still trades with itself at less than half the rate the G7 does internally — 4.8% of world trade against 10.2%.
India’s own ledger with the bloc it just chaired makes the declaration’s silence harder to justify. Between FY2021 and FY2026, exports to BRICS+ grew by 48.8% to $95.7 billion, while imports surged by 131.8% to $321.8 billion; the bloc’s share of India’s imports climbed from 35.2 to 41.5%, even as its share of India’s exports slipped. The bilateral gap with China alone widened to $131.6 billion in imports against $19.5 billion in exports. The UAE, not China, is now India’s largest single BRICS+ export market — a fact more instructive than anything in the declaration’s 140 points.
The declaration’s real commitments — local-currency settlement, the GIFT City risk lab, AI governance, and quota reform at the IMF and World Bank — are worth having, but they are inputs to a strategy, not a substitute for one. A bloc in which only 4 of 11 members are classified as democracies by the EIU, compared with all 7 of the G7, was never going to speak with one voice on much beyond broad principle. Trade numbers do not require consensus among eleven capitals. They require India to act on what it already knows.
Bharat Mandapam issued a declaration; it did not issue an accounting. The next chairship, whoever holds it, could do worse than add a 141st point: publish the bloc’s own trade ledger with each host country in the same document that lists its positions on tariffs and terrorism. Until then, the summit’s photographs will continue to say more than its paperwork does — and India’s $226.1 billion answer to “was it worth it” will remain in a GTRI spreadsheet rather than in a leaders’ declaration.
(The writer is an Economic Adviser, Advisory Support Group, Chief Minister’s Office, Government of Uttarakhand. Views are personal.)
