By R Suryamurthy
The New Delhi summit faces a familiar BRICS temptation: produce another carefully negotiated declaration, heavy with aspirational language, ambitious vocabulary and promises of a transformed financial order, while leaving the far more difficult questions of implementation for another summit, another working group and another year.
That would be a mistake. BRICS does not need another digital currency manifesto. It needs a roadmap—and, more importantly, the political will to follow one.
The proposal to link central bank digital currencies across the expanded grouping has undeniable strategic appeal. Faster cross-border settlements, lower transaction costs, greater use of local currencies and reduced dependence on a single payments architecture are legitimate objectives. But BRICS has repeatedly demonstrated that identifying a desirable objective is considerably easier than constructing the institutions required to achieve it.
The grouping’s problem is not a shortage of ideas. It is an excess of ambition disconnected from institutional capacity.
A declaration calling for “greater interoperability” costs nothing. Building interoperability requires countries to agree on who regulates transactions, where data reside, how sanctions are handled, who provides liquidity, how exchange-rate risks are absorbed, what happens when a payment fails and, most critically, which institutions are trusted with information that governments increasingly regard as strategic assets.
Those questions cannot be buried in diplomatic prose. They are the architecture. The danger for New Delhi is that BRICS will mistake agreement on a principle for agreement on a system. The two are not remotely the same. Eleven countries can endorse faster cross-border payments without agreeing on a common regulatory framework. They can support local-currency trade while disagreeing over currency convertibility. They can celebrate digital sovereignty while simultaneously refusing to surrender control over the data and infrastructure that genuine interoperability would require.
That contradiction lies at the heart of the BRICS project. The grouping wants integration without integration’s political costs. It wants connectivity without surrendering sovereignty.
It wants alternatives to existing Western-dominated financial infrastructure without creating the institutional discipline necessary to operate alternatives of its own.
Technology cannot resolve that contradiction. A CBDC network will not function simply because central banks develop compatible software. Payment systems are embedded in legal systems, banking regulations, national security doctrines and geopolitical relationships. The hardest part of interoperability is not connecting computers; it is connecting governments that do not necessarily trust one another.
That is why New Delhi should insist on a brutally practical approach. No grand BRICS digital currency. No artificial deadline for a bloc-wide payment network. No rhetorical attempt to present technological experimentation as a revolution in the international monetary order.
Instead, BRICS should begin with the questions that declarations usually avoid. Which bilateral trade corridors are large enough to justify local-currency settlement? Which currencies have sufficient liquidity? Where are currency-swap arrangements required? What common standards can regulators realistically accept? How will data privacy and localisation rules be reconciled? Who bears fraud, cybersecurity and exchange-rate risks? And what happens when geopolitical tensions make financial cooperation impossible?
Unless those questions have answers, “interoperability” will remain a diplomatic word rather than a functioning system.
The summit should therefore adopt a phased roadmap built from the bottom up rather than another vision imposed from the top down. Start with bilateral experiments. Test settlement mechanisms in specific trade corridors. Build currency-swap arrangements where persistent trade imbalances create liquidity problems. Develop common technical and regulatory standards gradually. Expand participation only after the earlier stages demonstrate that the system can withstand commercial and political pressure.
This may lack the drama of announcing a new BRICS financial architecture. But financial systems are not built through dramatic announcements. They are built through rules, institutions, trust and repeated transactions that work. BRICS must also abandon the intellectually lazy assumption that every alternative payment mechanism represents “de-dollarisation.” Reducing unnecessary dependence on a single payment channel is sensible risk diversification. Pretending that a network of digital currencies can displace the dollar from global commerce is political theatre.
The dollar’s dominance is not sustained by an absence of technology. It rests on deep financial markets, liquidity, global confidence and a vast ecosystem in which businesses, banks and governments can hold and deploy dollar assets.
A BRICS CBDC connection does not replicate those advantages. Nor does it need to. The strategic objective should be narrower and more credible: create additional channels through which trade can be settled when doing so makes commercial sense. That would itself be a meaningful achievement.
But BRICS should also recognise that its greatest weakness is internal asymmetry. The grouping contains economies with dramatically different sizes, currencies with varying degrees of convertibility and governments with sharply divergent strategic interests. Some members may welcome greater financial integration; others may support it only until it begins to compromise their control over capital, data or domestic financial systems.
These differences cannot be wished away through consensus language. Indeed, the more BRICS expands, the harder institutional integration becomes. Enlargement increases economic weight, geographical reach and political influence. It also imports additional conflicts, competing interests and regulatory systems. A larger BRICS may be more powerful as a diplomatic forum, but it is not necessarily better equipped to function as an integrated financial bloc.
That is precisely why the New Delhi summit must choose realism over symbolism. The success of India’s chairmanship should not be measured by the number of paragraphs in a summit declaration or by how forcefully leaders proclaim the arrival of a “multipolar financial order.” It should be measured by whether BRICS leaves New Delhi with a credible sequence of actions, clearly defined responsibilities and measurable milestones.
Who does what? By when? Under which legal framework? With what safeguards? And how will success be measured? Those are the questions a roadmap answers. A manifesto does not.
India, with its experience in building digital public infrastructure, has an opportunity to inject precisely this discipline into the BRICS conversation. But it must resist the temptation to convert domestic success into an assumption that international integration can be engineered through the same logic.
A national payment system operates within one sovereign jurisdiction. A BRICS payment system would operate across eleven. That difference is everything. Within a country, the state can establish regulations, assign authority and enforce compliance. Across BRICS, there is no supranational regulator, no common central bank, no unified legal system and no political mechanism capable of compelling members to accept rules they dislike.
Every advance will therefore depend on negotiation. Every technical standard will have political consequences. And every attempt at integration will collide with the limits of sovereignty.
The summit should acknowledge this reality rather than conceal it. The most valuable outcome from New Delhi would not be a spectacular announcement. It would be an admission that BRICS financial integration will be slow, uneven and incremental—and a decision to proceed anyway through carefully designed, commercially viable projects.
That requires patience, an attribute summit diplomacy rarely rewards. Yet patience may be the difference between building an alternative payments infrastructure and producing another archive of declarations.
BRICS has reached the point where rhetoric is becoming a liability. Each new promise raises expectations; each failure to implement reduces credibility. The grouping cannot indefinitely market itself as an architect of a new economic order while postponing the construction work.
The digital currency proposal is therefore a test of institutional maturity. Can BRICS move beyond slogans about multipolarity and sovereignty and address the mundane, difficult business of regulation, liquidity, dispute resolution, data governance and risk-sharing?
Can it build small systems that actually work before announcing large systems that do not exist? Can it accept that bilateral progress is better than multilateral paralysis? The answers will determine whether the CBDC initiative becomes a serious financial project or another footnote in BRICS diplomacy.
New Delhi should send a clear message: ambition without implementation is not leadership; it is merely well-worded procrastination. BRICS does not need another declaration promising a digital future. It needs deadlines, pilot projects, regulatory agreements, settlement mechanisms and institutions capable of surviving political disagreement.
Above all, it needs to understand that the future of cross-border finance will not be built at a summit table. It will be built after the summit—transaction by transaction, rule by rule and institution by institution. That is the roadmap BRICS needs. Anything less will simply be another declaration waiting to be forgotten. (IPA Service)
