India hosts the 18th BRICS summit on September 12 and 13, and chairs the grouping this year. It’s a good time to ask: In 17 years of summits, what has membership bought India?

Begin with the origin of BRICS. A marketing device for Goldman Sachs, and a very successful one, to persuade global fund managers to buy the stocks of four countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China. Politicians picked up the acronym at Yekaterinburg in 2009, and its author Jim O’Neill has since disowned it: “I never encouraged them to develop a political club.”

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Let us consider some facts. The Security Council. The Rio declaration of July 2025 had China and Russia “reiterate their support to the aspirations of Brazil and India to play a greater role in the United Nations, including its Security Council.” Aspirations. To play a greater role. Then in September 2024, the BRICS foreign ministers, meeting in New York, failed for the first time ever to issue a joint statement: Two new members, Egypt and Ethiopia, would not endorse the paragraph supporting permanent seats for Brazil, India and South Africa, (hereafter B_I_S) because the group could not agree which African country should hold Africa’s seat. Who acted against India’s interest? Good question.

The New Development Bank. India paid in $2 billion of capital and pledged $8 billion more on call. Ten years on, it has approved about $40 billion for all members together — against the $81 billion the World Bank committed in fiscal 2025 alone. India committed a further $18 billion to the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, the 2014 answer to the IMF, on which no member has drawn a dollar in 11 years. A decade’s cost: Capital tied up in a bank that does not lend at scale, and an insurance premium nobody has claimed.

So the delivery record is nil. But my objection is not just that BRICS underperforms; it is what it has become. India chaired BRICS in 2021; what came out of it – the now familiar trot: China and Russia reiterated support for B_I_S’s “aspiration to play a greater role in the UN”. Not our candidature. Our aspiration. In a year we chaired.

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That is what the platform is for. Two of our partners carry the largest unanswered questions in the world: A war Russia began and has not ended, and China’s silence on the origins of Covid and on its expansive mercantilism. On the second, I claim some standing. In a 1998 ICRIER paper, I argued that China’s 50 per cent devaluation between 1990 and 1993 was a principal cause of the East Asian crisis; the IMF, the Federal Reserve and the World Bank all said it did not matter. The mercantilism has exploded, and no correction to undervaluation is in the offing. An overvalued currency corrects itself, because deficits must be financed; an undervalued one need never correct. BRICS has never asked that question of China, and will not ask it at a summit India chairs. We are not in that room to be heard. We are there as window dressing.

Look at what this club offers as a growth model. Viksit Bharat means a high-income India, and the World Bank’s threshold from July 2026 is $14,375. Russia’s income per head was $15,160 in 2013 and $15,330 in 2024 — 11 years and 11 dollars — and it re-entered the high-income group only on war spending. Brazil has fallen from $12,950 to $9,930, South Africa from $7,930 to $6,110, both down 23 per cent. China, at $13,660, did not cross the threshold this July; it refuses to lift consumption at home, which is 40 per cent of GDP against a world average of 64, because the mercantilist surplus is the strategy. India is at $2,550, and to be viksit by 2047 must raise income per head by about 10 per cent a year in dollars; over 11 years we have managed 4.9 per cent. The countries that have done what we are attempting — Korea, Poland, Vietnam climbing now — are not in the room.

Set against that, the American balance sheet. The United States takes a fifth of our goods exports and over half our software exports, sends 28 per cent of our remittances, holds $390 billion of Indian securities, and has put some $100 billion of direct investment into India. China’s cumulative direct investment here is $2.5 billion, our deficit with it hit a record $112 billion in 2025-26, and it is the country that throttled our rare-earth magnets and pulled Foxconn’s engineers from our iPhone plants. Russia sold us $47 billion of oil and bought $4.9 billion of everything.

What should India do to enhance our future? Forget BRICS. Our future is as a global partner of the West — Europe and the US. And note, and remember, who gains if India does not sign a trade deal with America.

The writer is chairperson, Technical Expert Group for the first official Household Income Survey for India. Views are personal