BRICS Meets in New Delhi This Week. The Payments Item Is the One to Watch.

India hosts the 18th BRICS Summit at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on 12–13 September 2026, with a cross-border local-currency payment framework, smart grid cooperation and a digital agriculture network on the table.

By the UISC BD Editorial Desk · United Information Service Center · Published 10 September 2026 · 6-minute read

India hosts the 18th BRICS Summit at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September 2026, closing a year-long chairship held under the theme Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.

The bloc arriving in Delhi is much larger than the one most readers picture.

Who Is Actually in the Room

BRICS now has eleven members: Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

Ten more countries participate as partners: Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

Twenty-one countries, covering a very large share of the world's population and a growing share of its output. The original four-letter acronym stopped describing the membership some time ago.

The Payments Framework

The most consequential item to emerge from India's chairship is a cross-border payment framework linking national payment systems for local-currency settlement, piloted by BRICS foreign ministers.

Note carefully what it is not. It explicitly sidesteps a common BRICS currency — the idea that generates most of the headlines and none of the practical work.

Linking existing national payment rails so two countries can settle a trade in their own currencies is a far more modest proposition than a shared currency, and a far more achievable one. India has done this domestically at enormous scale, and the same architectural thinking sits behind Bangladesh's own mobile financial services network and its digital public infrastructure.

For any country that imports in dollars and earns in dollars, an alternative settlement route is a hedge rather than a revolution. That is the correct way to read this.

Energy and Agriculture

Two other outcomes from the chairship have practical content rather than communiqué language.

BRICS adopted Guiding Principles on Energy Storage and Smart Grids and launched a Digital Centre of Excellence for Smart Grids and Energy Storage. Storage is the binding constraint on every solar programme in the world, including Bangladesh's, and shared technical standards make equipment cheaper for everyone inside the framework.

Agriculture ministers agreed to establish networks on regenerative and digital agriculture, the digital network covering artificial intelligence, geospatial technology, digital public infrastructure and data-driven services for farmers. They also agreed to establish a Global Forum on Farmers' Rights in Seed Systems.

Seed rights are not a soft issue. Who owns and can replant seed determines input costs for smallholders across the developing world, and it is one of the few genuinely contested areas of international agricultural law.

The Full Agenda

The summit builds on work spanning farmer-focused agriculture, people-centred urban development, future-ready mobility, skilled workers, women-led development, wider energy access, global health, traditional and integrative medicine, disaster risk reduction, climate resilience, small and medium enterprises, startups, global value chains, anti-corruption and anti-narcotics cooperation, smart grids, energy transition, the circular economy and nature-based solutions.

That list is long enough to be a warning as much as a description. Multilateral groupings that take on everything frequently deliver little, and BRICS has a mixed record on converting declarations into functioning institutions. The New Development Bank is the main thing that did get built.

Why Bangladesh Should Be Paying Attention

Bangladesh is not a member or a partner. It is, however, squarely in the constituency this agenda is aimed at.

Three items map directly onto Bangladeshi priorities. Local-currency settlement matters for a country managing a $35 billion remittance inflow and a substantial import bill. Disaster risk reduction and climate resilience are the areas where Bangladesh has genuine expertise to contribute, having cut cyclone deaths a hundredfold. And digital agriculture is a field where Bangladeshi startups are already operating.

Bangladesh has spent 2026 building bilateral relationships across every bloc simultaneously — Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, China, the United States — and pursuing regional partnership status with ASEAN. Four of the eleven BRICS members and one of the ten partners are already significant Bangladeshi partners.

What to Judge It By

Not the declaration length. Whether the payment framework moves from pilot to live settlement, and whether the Centre of Excellence on storage produces standards anyone adopts.

Everything else on the list has been announced before, at other summits, by other groupings.

Related reading

• Xi Jinping Arrives in Delhi Today, His First India Visit in Seven Years
• World Leaders Gather at the UN on 22 September. A Bangladeshi Presides.
• India and Bangladesh Open New Transit Routes as CEPA Talks Advance
• The Ganges Treaty Expires This December. What Comes Next?

Sources

• "BRICS Summit 2026: who will be in New Delhi, what's on the agenda," Business Today — businesstoday.in
• "BRICS ministerial meetings: what India's 2026 chairship delivered," Business Standard — business-standard.com
• "BRICS Summit 2026: key likely outcomes as India drives a transformative global agenda," The Tribune — tribuneindia.com
• "BRICS Summit 2026: 11 members, 10 partners explained," Rio Times — riotimesonline.com