Gandhinagar hosted a meeting this week that most trade desks in the Western press will file under routine multilateral housekeeping. They would be wrong. India's chairship of the BRICS Contact Group on Economic and Trade Issues — its fourth time leading the grouping, after 2012, 2016, and 2021 — arrives at precisely the moment when the architecture of world trade is being stress-tested from multiple directions simultaneously. What India said in that room, and what it intends to do with the chair, deserves careful reading.
A Platform That Has Quietly Outgrown Its Sceptics
The numbers that opened India's address at Gandhinagar carry their own argument. Intra-BRICS merchandise trade has grown more than thirteen-fold — from USD 84 billion in 2003 to USD 1.17 trillion in 2024 — outpacing both global trade and South-South trade over the same two decades. The expanded grouping now accounts for nearly 27 per cent of global GDP, 24 per cent of global merchandise exports, and around 22 per cent of global FDI inflows. Its share of global output at purchasing power parity has moved from 24 per cent in 2003 to around 39 per cent in 2024. These are not the statistics of a talking shop; they are the footprint of an economic bloc that has compounded quietly while analysts debated its relevance.
Yet India's own statement identifies the figure that matters most for what comes next: intra-BRICS trade still accounts for only around 5 per cent of world trade. Thirteen-fold growth, and the grouping's internal commerce is still a rounding error in the global ledger. The gap between the bloc's weight in world output and its depth of internal trade integration is where the real opportunity — and India's chairship agenda — sits.
The Services Gap Is India's Opening
Merchandise trade gets the headlines; services trade is where India's comparative advantage concentrates. The Gandhinagar statement put the aggregate number on record: BRICS countries together accounted for around USD 2.64 trillion in global services trade in 2024, representing nearly 16 per cent of world services trade. IT services, business process outsourcing, finance, transport, tourism, and digitally delivered services — the categories in which India has spent three decades building globally competitive capacity — all feature in that aggregate. And yet, by India's own assessment, intra-BRICS services engagement remains far below its potential.
That phrase — far below potential — is diplomatic language for a structural gap that India is positioned to monetise. The bulk of India's services exports have historically flowed toward the US and Europe. That concentration made commercial sense when those markets were growing and their regulatory frameworks were predictable. Both assumptions are shakier today. Rising non-tariff barriers, tightening professional mobility rules, and periodic political turbulence in Western client economies have made export diversification not just desirable but prudent. The BRICS services trade relationship offers a parallel track — one where India arrives not as a junior vendor seeking market access but as the chair setting the agenda for deeper digital connectivity, professional mobility frameworks, and innovation-led growth cooperation.
Digitally delivered services deserve particular attention. The Gandhinagar address noted that recent disruptions have shown that digitally enabled trade channels can help sustain economic activity even when physical trade routes face challenges. That is a pointed observation given what is happening in West Asia. India's software services sector, its growing base in AI-enabled business processes, and its expanding fintech and healthtech export capacity are precisely the kinds of digitally delivered services that intra-BRICS frameworks could unlock — across the Gulf, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America simultaneously.
West Asia, Oil, and the Supply Chain Argument
The energy dimension of the Gandhinagar meeting was not peripheral. India placed it at the centre. Global oil supply fell by 1.8 million barrels per day in April 2026 alone, with cumulative losses of 12.8 million barrels per day since February 2026. The IMF warning cited in India's address — that prolonged disruption and trade friction could pull global real GDP growth from 3.1 per cent down toward 2 per cent — is not an abstraction for an economy as energy-import-dependent as India's. Fuel price spikes transmit directly into freight costs, manufacturing input costs, and household inflation. Emerging market and developing economies absorb the shock asymmetrically; the Gandhinagar statement said as much explicitly, noting that skyrocketing fuel prices weaken growth and hit EMDEs hardest.
India's response is not to lament the vulnerability but to use the BRICS platform to build around it. Supply chain resilience, energy security cooperation, and — critically — addressing restrictive export controls on critical minerals and industrial inputs are all on the table. The critical minerals agenda is one where the BRICS geography is especially relevant: the grouping spans major producer and major consumer economies, and a framework that ensures transparent and reliable access to critical inputs serves India's manufacturing ambitions as directly as any bilateral trade deal.
Tariffs, Non-Tariff Barriers, and the MSME Asymmetry
The trade condition data in India's address is worth dwelling on. In 2025, global tariffs on exports rose by 10 per cent for developed countries, 16 per cent for developing countries, and 18 per cent for LDCs. The structure of that asymmetry — where countries least able to absorb trade shocks face the steepest tariff increases — is precisely the development inequity that India has consistently flagged at the WTO and now brings into the BRICS forum. But the more striking data point concerns non-tariff measures: they impose higher export costs than tariffs for 88 per cent of countries. Tariff negotiations, in other words, have been fighting the last war. The real friction in contemporary trade is regulatory — standards, certifications, customs procedures, data localisation rules — and it falls disproportionately on small exporters who lack the compliance infrastructure of large corporations.
This is where India's MSME agenda inside BRICS becomes more than a political talking point. MSMEs contribute 31.1 per cent to India's GDP and 35.4 per cent to manufacturing output. These are the enterprises that would gain most from simplified intra-BRICS trade procedures, mutual recognition of standards, and shared digital trade infrastructure. They are also the enterprises least able to navigate fragmented, opaque regulatory environments. India's chairship push for MSME internationalisation is thus simultaneously a domestic economic priority and a foreign trade architecture objective — the kind of alignment that makes for durable policy commitment.
WTO Reform: Complement, Not Replace
India has been consistent on one point that deserves emphasis in any analysis of its BRICS posture: the platform is not positioned as an alternative to the multilateral trading system. India remains committed to a transparent, inclusive and member-driven WTO reform process with development at its core, while preserving the foundational principles of non-discrimination, consensus-based decision-making, and equity. India continues to support the restoration of a fully functional and binding two-tier dispute settlement system at the WTO. This is not ritual deference — it reflects a considered strategic position. India has too much invested in the multilateral rules framework to want it hollowed out; what it wants is a framework that actually serves the interests of developing countries rather than enshrining the preferences of the countries that drafted its original architecture.
BRICS, in this reading, is not a replacement vehicle but a coordination mechanism — a way for emerging and developing economies to arrive at multilateral negotiations with shared positions, combined statistical weight, and a common articulation of what reform should look like. India integrated into the global economy through free trade agreements with more than 38 countries; it has no interest in dismantling the system that facilitated that integration. It has every interest in reshaping that system's governance so it stops treating development as an afterthought.
The arithmetic of the BRICS opportunity is simple enough: a grouping that commands 39 per cent of world GDP at PPP but generates only 5 per cent of world trade in its internal commerce has built enormous latent value that institutional friction has so far suppressed. India's fourth chairship, with its focus on services liberalisation, digital trade frameworks, MSME market access, and supply chain resilience, is an attempt to convert that latent value into actual trade flows — and to do so through frameworks that India helped design, from the chair, at a moment when the alternative architectures on offer from elsewhere are delivering 18 per cent tariff surcharges on the world's poorest exporters.
