BRICS leaders opened their two-day summit in New Delhi this weekend with supply chains and trade logistics emerging as one of the grouping’s central economic themes, as India used its chairship to push members toward more resilient and predictable trade infrastructure.
The push was laid out a day before the formal summit sessions began, at the BRICS Business Forum on Friday, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar both singled out supply-chain resilience as a priority for the bloc, even as fresh trade data showed India’s commerce with BRICS partners has more than doubled over the past five years.
A Bloc Too Big to Move on Old Infrastructure
Opening the BRICS Business Forum, described as the largest edition held to date, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid out the scale of what the grouping now represents: roughly half the world’s population, about 40 percent of global GDP, and more than a quarter of global trade. He pointed out that BRICS’ combined GDP has grown nearly four-and-a-half times since the bloc’s founding in 2006, nearly double the pace of the rest of the world. Modi framed India’s role as that of an “economic bridge” at a time of rising trade barriers, noting India has signed free trade agreements with close to 40 countries since 2014, and reiterated support for freedom of navigation, a direct nod to the sea lanes that carry the bulk of BRICS merchandise trade.
That framing matters for logistics planners: a bloc growing faster than global GDP, spanning five continents, cannot rely on trade corridors and customs regimes designed for a much smaller grouping formed two decades ago.
Jaishankar’s Five-Point Supply Chain Checklist
Speaking at the same forum, Jaishankar delivered the summit’s most direct message on supply chains. He said BRICS is meeting at a time of significant geopolitical and economic disruption, with conflicts, pandemics and climate-related events reshaping economies, and that “volatility, uncertainty, and complexity have become defining features of the world around us.”
He called on BRICS members to pursue five things: genuine market practices, dependable logistics, a predictable business environment, diversified commercial relationships, and transparent trade and investment. He said the aim should be to make it easier for businesses across BRICS countries “to find more partners, access more markets, connect supply networks and convert complementarities into viable commercial partnerships.”
Jaishankar named supply-chain connectivity and trade facilitation as explicit priorities for the bloc, alongside services, agriculture, agri-technology and digital delivery. He also called for energy systems capable of coping with disruption, paired with transition pathways suited to individual countries’ circumstances, a nod to the wide gap between BRICS members that export energy and those that import it.
He linked the push to India’s BRICS chairship, which has centred on the theme of resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability, and noted the discussion builds on the BRICS Trade Ministers’ meeting held in Jaipur in August, where members backed work toward a BRICS Economic Partnership Strategy 2030 covering balanced trade, services and resilient global value chains.
The Numbers Behind the Push
A fresh ASSOCHAM Global Research and Strategy Centre report, released to coincide with the summit, gives the trade case some hard numbers. India’s trade with BRICS partners has more than doubled in five years, from $203 billion in 2020-21 to $417 billion in 2025-26, with Indian exports to the bloc at $96 billion this year. ASSOCHAM projects exports could reach $200 billion by 2030 if India deepens South-South cooperation and diversifies beyond its traditional markets.
The sectors ASSOCHAM flags as having the most room to grow, engineering goods, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, textiles, automobiles, electronics, minerals and metals, gems and jewellery, agricultural and marine products, renewable energy and digital services, are all sectors where supply-chain depth, not just tariff access, determines competitiveness. The report explicitly links the opportunity to more than merchandise volume: it calls out production and sourcing networks, value-chain integration, technology cooperation and settlement systems as the areas where India needs to build capacity. It also ties BRICS trade cooperation to improving India’s access to critical minerals, energy, technology and capital, inputs that are as much a logistics and sourcing challenge as a trade-policy one.
What This Means for Supply Chain Planners
Three practical signals emerge from the summit’s opening sessions for anyone managing trade flows into or out of BRICS markets:
- Diversification is now official policy language, not just a company-level hedge. Both Modi’s and Jaishankar’s remarks treat diversified commercial relationships and “shorter, more redundant” supply chains as bloc-level objectives, suggesting future BRICS frameworks may actively support alternate sourcing and routing options rather than reinforcing single-corridor dependence.
- Trade facilitation and customs harmonisation are likely near-term work streams. Jaishankar’s call for “dependable logistics” and a “predictable business environment,” paired with the Jaipur ministerial’s work on the BRICS Economic Partnership Strategy 2030, points toward practical initiatives on documentation, standards and value-chain integration rather than purely tariff-focused agreements.
- Energy and critical minerals logistics are being treated as a supply-chain resilience issue, not a separate energy-policy track. The repeated pairing of “resilient supply chains” with energy systems and critical minerals access suggests logistics planning for these categories will increasingly be shaped by BRICS-level cooperation, not only bilateral deals.
With the summit’s formal outcomes, including any joint statement on the proposed New Investment Platform for intra-BRICS infrastructure financing, still to be finalised over the two-day meeting, the direction from the Business Forum is nonetheless clear: BRICS wants to be judged not just on trade volume growth, but on how resilient, transparent and interoperable its members’ supply chains become over the rest of this decade.
