What India Really Wants From BRICS As Trade Deficit Widens

As world leaders converge on Bharat Mandapam for the 18th BRICS Summit this weekend, India is using its turn as chair to press a pointed ask of its partners: easier market access, and a fairer shot at selling into the bloc it helped build. Behind that ask lies a trade relationship that has grown fast, but lopsidedly.

Fresh trade data shows India's deficit with BRICS nations has widened to $226.1 billion in FY2025-26, even as overall trade with the bloc has grown to about $417.5 billion -- more than double the roughly $203 billion recorded five years ago in FY2020-21.

A separate calendar-year analysis by Rubix Data Sciences put India's BRICS trade deficit at $224 billion in CY2025, up from $117 billion in CY2021 -- with China (over $100 billion) and Russia (around $55 billion) as the two biggest contributors. Delhi-based think tank GTRI has separately flagged India's "increasing reliance on Chinese industrial inputs" as a structural risk to watch, even as the country's overall trade position is cushioned by strong services exports and remittance inflows.

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Significantly, the growth in trade itself isn't in question. Exports have risen 48.8 per cent to $95.7 billion, but imports have climbed faster, up 131.8 per cent to $321.8 billion. As a consequence, BRICS now takes in only around 22 per cent of India's exports while supplying more than 40 per cent of its imports -- a gap India's negotiators are hoping this summit will help narrow.

Where The Deficit Actually Comes From

The country-wise breakdown for FY2025-26 makes clear this is not a uniform problem:

China alone accounts for roughly half of the total gap, followed by Russia. Notably, India runs a rare surplus with Egypt and Ethiopia -- a reminder that "BRICS" is not one relationship but eleven very different ones, now spanning everything from Gulf oil producers to African economies since the bloc's 2024-25 expansion.

Why The Headline Number Can Mislead

It would be easy -- and, this week especially, politically convenient -- to read the widening gap purely as a warning sign. But that framing misses the more important structural story, according to Sohom Banerjee, founder of advisory and research firm Quantive Advisory LLP:

"India's widening trade deficit with BRICS should not be read merely as evidence of an unhealthy commercial relationship; it is better understood as a reflection of the asymmetry in India's current economic integration with the grouping... India is becoming increasingly important as a market for BRICS suppliers without yet securing a comparable position as a supplier to the bloc," he told NDTV.

The deficit with Russia, he notes, is largely a function of discounted crude purchases that have arguably strengthened India's energy security since the Ukraine war reshaped global oil flows -- a point echoed elsewhere in coverage of the India-Russia track at this summit, which highlights energy, AI and defence as areas of deepening cooperation. The UAE imbalance similarly reflects commodity and energy trade layered on top of fast-growing bilateral commerce, not industrial dependency.

China is the harder case. As Banerjee puts it, the deficit there is concentrated in "machinery, electronics, components, chemicals and other industrial inputs that are deeply embedded in Indian manufacturing" -- with imports above $130 billion against exports below $20 billion. That is not a deficit India can simply tariff its way out of without hurting its own factories; it is a dependency question, tied to India's unresolved ambition to build a domestic electronics and advanced-manufacturing base.

The Geopolitical Undercurrent

This is where the trade data intersects with the summit's optics. BRICS was conceived as a politically multipolar counterweight to Western-dominated institutions, but Banerjee's central argument is that it remains "commercially still highly asymmetric" -- with China functioning as the bloc's manufacturing core while other members, India included, occupy more peripheral positions in intra-BRICS value chains. 

The risk Banerjee flags is that BRICS's next wave of integration - easier cross-border payments, local-currency settlement, digital trade corridors, logistics connectivity -- could quietly deepen India's dependence rather than correct it, unless matched by a parallel push on India's own export competitiveness.

What India Is Actually Asking For

This is reportedly the subtext of India's push, ahead of and during this summit, for easier market access within the bloc: sector-specific negotiations, mutual recognition of standards, faster customs clearance and fewer non-tariff barriers, particularly for pharmaceuticals, engineering goods, automobiles, food processing, chemicals and digital services. Banerjee's prescription is explicitly country-specific rather than one-size-fits-all -- pushing manufactured and services exports to Russia, resolving standards friction with China, deepening ties with Indonesia and Brazil, and using the UAE as a commercial gateway into the Middle East and Africa.

The more meaningful scorecard for India's BRICS chairship, on this reading, will not be whether next year's deficit number shrinks. It will be whether India moves up the value chain within the bloc it is currently hosting -- from a growing market for BRICS goods to something closer to a producer within BRICS supply chains.