Brics summit: What’s on agenda as world leaders gather in Delhi amid global tensions
The 18th BRICS Summit is being held in New Delhi on September 12-13, 2026, at the Bharat Mandapam convention centre, under India's chairship for the theme "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability."
Heads of state and government from the bloc's member countries, along with partner-country representatives and invited guests, are gathering amid heightened global geopolitical and trade tensions.
The two-day agenda is expected to cover resilience of global supply chains, boosting intra-BRICS trade and investment, and cooperation across technology, health, food and energy security.
The summit follows a year-long calendar of ministerial and working-group meetings held across Indian cities during India's 2026 chairship, culminating in a leaders'-level outcome document.
The Sherpa Track: How Summit Agendas Are Actually Negotiated
Leaders' summits such as BRICS (and G20, G7) are not negotiated at the summit table itself — the substantive agenda and draft outcome document are worked out in advance through the "Sherpa track," a system of personal representatives of each head of state/government who conduct the technical negotiations. In India's case, the BRICS/G20 Sherpa is a senior official appointed by the Prime Minister's Office, supported by "Sous-Sherpas" and sector-specific working groups (finance, trade, health, environment, counter-terrorism, etc.).
Key Details
- The term "Sherpa" originated in G7 summit diplomacy in the 1970s, borrowed from the Sherpa guides of the Himalayas who lead climbers to the summit — the Sherpa "leads" leaders to a negotiated outcome.
- Under finance ministries, a parallel "Finance Track" (Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, or FMCBG) runs alongside the Sherpa Track for economic and monetary agenda items — a structure common to both BRICS and G20.
- India's 2026 BRICS chairship involved a reported 350-plus meetings across more than 25 Indian cities in the Sherpa/working-group process before the leaders' summit — mirroring the format India also used during its 2023 G20 presidency.
- The summit's final output is typically a consensus-based outcome document (a "Declaration"), which is a political statement, not a legally binding treaty.
The broad thematic agenda reported for the 2026 summit — supply chains, trade/investment, technology, health, food and energy security — reflects the priority areas negotiated bottom-up through this Sherpa and working-group process over India's chairship year, rather than being decided at the summit itself.
Bharat Mandapam as a Recurring Indian Summit Venue
Bharat Mandapam, the International Exhibition-cum-Convention Centre at Pragati Maidan in New Delhi, is being used for the BRICS Summit just as it was for the 18th G20 Summit hosted by India on 9-10 September 2023 — making it India's primary venue for hosting large multilateral leaders' summits.
Key Details
- Bharat Mandapam spans roughly 123 acres and includes a convention centre with a capacity of about 7,000, making it one of the largest such facilities in India.
- The G20 New Delhi Summit (2023) was held under the theme "Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam" ("One Earth, One Family, One Future") and adopted the New Delhi Leaders' Declaration by consensus, including on contentious geopolitical language — a precedent for how consensus outcome documents are negotiated even among states with divergent positions.
- Both G20 and BRICS operate on a rotating annual chairship/presidency model and produce a leaders' declaration as their central deliverable, though G20 has a wider membership (19 countries + EU + African Union) spanning both developed and developing economies, while BRICS is exclusively an emerging/Global-South-oriented grouping.
- Comparable dedicated summit infrastructure exists in other countries (e.g., Bali's Nusa Dua for the 2022 G20), reflecting the practice of purpose-building or repurposing large convention venues for high-profile multilateral events.
Hosting BRICS 2026 at the same venue used for G20 2023 signals India's institutional investment in large-summit diplomacy infrastructure and allows comparison of how consensus-building operates across the two groupings.
Supply Chain Resilience and Critical Minerals Cooperation
"Securing critical supply chains," cited among the 2026 summit's themes, reflects a broader global and BRICS-specific policy push around critical minerals (such as lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, and graphite) that are essential inputs for clean-energy technology, electronics and defence manufacturing, and where supply is currently concentrated in a small number of countries.
Key Details
- India constituted the National Critical Mineral Mission (approved by the Union Cabinet in January 2025) to boost domestic exploration, mining and processing of critical minerals, and amended the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957 in 2023 to enable auctioning of critical mineral blocks.
- The Ministry of Mines maintains India's official critical minerals list (30 minerals identified in 2023), covering categories including lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earth elements and graphite.
- China dominates global processing capacity for several critical minerals (notably rare earths), a concentration that has driven supply-chain-diversification discussions in multiple multilateral forums, including the Quad's critical minerals initiative and now BRICS-level discussions on securing supply.
- India has separately joined the Mineral Security Partnership (MSP), a US-led plurilateral initiative distinct from BRICS, illustrating that India pursues supply-chain resilience through multiple, sometimes overlapping, multilateral tracks.
Supply-chain and critical-minerals resilience appearing on the BRICS agenda reflects a convergence of economic-security concerns across otherwise geopolitically distinct groupings (BRICS, Quad, MSP), all responding to the same underlying concentration risk in global mineral supply chains.
- 18th BRICS Summit: September 12-13, 2026, Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi.
- Summit theme: "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability."
- India assumed the BRICS chairship on January 1, 2026 — its fourth chairship (after 2012, 2016, 2021).
- Comparable venue precedent: G20 New Delhi Summit, 9-10 September 2023, also at Bharat Mandapam.
- Bharat Mandapam convention centre capacity: approximately 7,000; campus area approximately 123 acres.
- India's National Critical Mineral Mission: approved January 2025; official critical minerals list: 30 minerals (2023).
- BRICS full membership at the time of the 2026 summit: 11 countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, UAE, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia), plus a tier of Partner Countries admitted from 2025.