It is the biggest gathering of emerging economy leaders that New Delhi has ever seen and it is not a gathering dominated by slogans about a new world order like previous editions of this event. But the reality of the 18th BRICS Summit that opens on September 12 at Bharat Mandapam, with leaders of eight major economies representing nearly half the global GDP on a purchasing-power basis, nearly half the world's population and a quarter of international trade, will be far more pedestrian and far more impactful: Invoicing mechanisms, supply chain resilience, digital payment rails, and small-business financing.

The rotating chairship of the G77 passed to India this year on January 1, and since then, it has been a very busy year of the rotating chairmanship with numerous meetings, notably at ministerial and sherpa level, organised under the title “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.” What a diplomat would typically turn to when he needs four words that rhyme with nothing, and there the meaning has been exceptionally real.

Among the ideas put forward are a BRICS invoice discounting mechanism to speed up the availability of working capital for exporters; a global value-chain plan to decrease the bloc's reliance on any single manufacturing hub; and a portal for SMEs to find partners on the other side of the globe, and a start-up fund to enable entrepreneurs in Cairo, Jakarta or São Paulo to access capital pools closer to home than Silicon Valley or London. Then there is the effort to connect digital public infrastructure, which India has already developed at scale, with lower costs for identity verification and instant payments, to other members, so that they can avoid the high costs of the banking branch networks developed over decades in the West.

It was an intentional change of tone over the previous years of the bloc's history, where summits were often marked by extensive statements, brimming with geopolitical rhetoric, but empty of any actionable measures that a finance ministry could take. The membership has also undergone significant shifts since the founding four countries Brazil, Russia, India and China first got together as a group in 2009. South Africa became a Member State in 2011. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE joined the ranks in 2024 and Indonesia joined in 2025, increasing the number of full members to 11 with a growing number of partner states.

That growth has endowed BRICS with real economic power, but also made it increasingly difficult to maintain the bloc's unity on any political issue. Saudi Arabia and UAE are seated in the same room with Iran. There are also regional rivalries between Egypt and Ethiopia. The Brazilian government is openly on the left side and some of the Gulf nations are decidedly not. This time, the foreign ministers' meeting never resulted in a consensus outcome document, in part due to disagreements over the phrasing of the language on the Palestinian question, as the UAE was said to have tried to downplay elements that others wanted included.

It's an issue worth dwelling on, seeing as how it has been the cause of New Delhi steering the agenda so firmly towards the economic front. Eleven very different governments can still find common ground in a number of areas, such as trade and energy security, healthcare cooperation and agricultural technology. Xi Jinping is expected to be in the Indian capital for the first time since 2019, when he visited in the wake of the Galwan clash, and Vladimir Putin, for what would be his second visit in a year.

President of Iran is also expected to participate with the prime minister of Bangladesh, and other invitees who are expected to attend the outreach. The optics of Xi and Putin on the sidelines of Narendra Modi will see plenty of commentaries, but the groundwork laid by the two sherpas indicates the working sessions will be more on mundanely energy-related topics harmonisation of customs procedures, more local-currency lending by the New Development Bank and how the energy exporters can deliver energy to the energy-hungry more efficiently.

Readers objectors to the currency questions have, naturally enough, hung over it all. Since 2023, all BRICS summits have generated speculation about a shared currency or an aggressive campaign to de-dollarise, but in each case it has been a far cry from the headlines. In this regard, India's own government has been careful enough to tell parliament and the media repeatedly that de-dollarisation is not on its agenda, even at the same time that it is looking at settling trade on local currencies for certain trade corridors, especially with Russia.

Washington has demonstrated the willingness to use tariffs as a blunt instrument against the bloc with that caution very much in mind. A further levy is still a live possibility against members believed to be engaged in "anti-American" currency policy and India has been negotiating the removal of punitive tariffs on some of its exports to the United States, which were once as high as 50 percent, in part because of its ongoing import of Russian crude. No, New Delhi is not in the mood to re-open the wound days before a meeting it is hosting.

So what does come out of this is a coalition that has grown beyond its original ideal of challenging the financial supremacy of the West and is instead developing the mundane infrastructure of an alternative trading system side by side: invoice financing, payment interoperability, supply-chain diversification while avoiding the raucous political squabbles on the agenda? That plumbing is more important than any communiqué language for these 11 economies. The ability to get a working invoice discounting mechanism in place, or an MSME match-making portal, in Indonesia, next to Vietnam, or a textile manufacturer in Gujarat, would be more productive than another set of statements on multipolarity.