India and South-South Cooperation

What South-South Cooperation Actually Is

The phrase is used loosely enough that it has almost stopped meaning anything. It is not a synonym for aid, not a synonym for the Global South, and not a synonym for non-alignment. It names a specific kind of relationship — horizontal exchange between developing countries — and the specificity is what makes it a claim rather than a slogan.

Three things it is not

• Not aid. Aid is vertical and asymmetric: a donor with resources, a recipient with needs, and a set of conditions attached to the transfer. South-South cooperation is framed as partnership between equals, in which both parties are developing countries and both are understood to gain. The vocabulary matters — India does not call itself a donor and does not call its partners recipients.
• Not the Global South. The Global South is a category of countries; South-South cooperation is a mode of interaction between them. A country can belong to the first without practising much of the second.
• Not non-alignment. Non-alignment was a posture towards the Cold War’s two blocs. South-South cooperation is an economic and technical programme that survived the Cold War’s end intact, and its most active period came afterwards.

The definition and the principles

• The working definition used across the United Nations system describes it as shared capacity development between developing countries through exchanges of knowledge, skills, resources and technical know-how, undertaken on terms the participating states themselves set.
• Its stated principles are consistent wherever they are set out: respect for national sovereignty and national ownership, independence, equality, non-conditionality, non-interference in domestic affairs, and mutual benefit.
• It is explicitly complementary to North-South cooperation, not a substitute for it. This is not a technicality. The whole intergovernmental architecture of South-South cooperation insists on the point, and so does India, because the alternative reading — that the South can develop by trading with itself and can therefore dispense with Northern capital, markets and technology — is both economically false and diplomatically self-defeating.
• Triangular cooperation is the hybrid: a Southern-led partnership between developing countries, financed or technically supported by a developed country or a multilateral agency, with the Southern partners retaining ownership of the design. It is the form in which most Southern development money is actually spent.
• S. Jaishankar’s stated position is that South-South cooperation must run as a parallel process to North-South cooperation rather than as a substitute for it, and that the Sustainable Development Goals can be met only by the two together.

The lineage, compactly

Moment	Year	What it contributed
Bandung Conference, Indonesia	1955	Twenty-nine newly independent states met as peers rather than as colonies; the founding political moment
Group of 77 at the first UNCTAD	1964	The South’s standing negotiating caucus, now 134 members, with Uruguay in the chair for 2026
Buenos Aires Plan of Action	1978	The charter document; gave the field its first acronym, TCDC — technical cooperation among developing countries — and set out eight objectives centred on collective self-reliance
UN Special Unit, later the UN Office for South-South Cooperation	1978 onward	The institutional home inside the UN system; today manages the trust funds through which much of it is delivered
Nairobi outcome document	2009	The High-level Conference restated the principles for the post-Cold-War era and fixed the complementarity language
BAPA+40, Buenos Aires	March 2019	The Second High-level UN Conference; forty years on, it registered how far Southern providers had outgrown the 1978 framework

• The New International Economic Order demand of the 1970s is the direct political ancestor of the Global South platform India now convenes; the NIEO record itself is a separate subject and is treated on its own terms elsewhere in this series.

The Global South as a political category, and India’s awkwardness inside it

• The term is political, not geographic. Australia and New Zealand sit in the southern hemisphere and are not in it; Mongolia and Kazakhstan sit far north and are. What the category tracks is a shared position in the international division of labour and a shared experience of colonial or semi-colonial subordination, not latitude.
• The category is contested from within. Its members range from Singapore to Somalia: no common income level, no common regime type, and on climate finance the small island states and the large hydrocarbon producers want opposite things.
• India occupies the category awkwardly, and the awkwardness is worth stating rather than hiding. A state that is a G20 member, a nuclear-weapon power, a permanent-membership claimant on the Security Council, and among the largest economies in the world is not a typical member of any constituency of the poor.
• The defence India offers is that its per capita income remains low and its own experience of building capacity under constraint is what makes its offer credible. The criticism is that size and ambition make it a competitor for the group’s leadership rather than a member of it. Both are true at once.

India’s Doctrine and Where It Descends From

India did not adopt South-South cooperation as a policy at a particular date. It arrived at it by extending an argument it had already made about its own independence, and the argument’s structure explains why India’s version of the doctrine has the particular shape it has.

The founding claim

• Nehru’s proposition was that India’s independence was incomplete while other Asian and African peoples remained colonised. Freedom was treated as indivisible, which converted solidarity from sentiment into obligation.
• The Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in March 1947 was convened five months before India was itself independent — a striking sequencing that says the commitment preceded the sovereignty. Bandung in 1955 universalised it.
• Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — the world is one family — supplies the civilisational vocabulary. It is invoked constantly, and it does real work: it frames India’s assistance as familial obligation rather than transaction, which is precisely the register a state without large resources needs.
• Panchsheel, and its principle of non-interference in internal affairs, is the doctrinal source of India’s no-conditionality rule. The line runs directly: if interference in domestic affairs is impermissible between states, attaching governance conditions to assistance is impermissible too. India’s refusal of conditionality is an inference from a stated principle, not an improvisation.

“As far as India is concerned, our engagement with the Global South is not just a matter of policy, it is ingrained in the very fabric of our culture and philosophy.” — Ruchira Kamboj

From solidarity to capability

• Phase one, 1947 to 1991 — commitment without means. India led at UNCTAD, in the G-77 and in the Non-Aligned Movement, and it started ITEC in 1964. But a foreign-exchange-constrained economy could offer training slots and rhetoric, not capital.
• Phase two, 1991 to 2014 — the acquisition of instruments. Liberalisation produced an economy with surplus to deploy. The line-of-credit scheme was consolidated into IDEAS in 2003-04, and in 2012 the Ministry of External Affairs created the Development Partnership Administration to hold the pieces together — appraisal, implementation and capacity building under one roof, in place of a function scattered across ministries.
• Phase three, 2014 onward — from participation to convening. The change is that India stopped joining Southern institutions built by others and started building them: the International Solar Alliance in 2015, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure in 2019, the Global Biofuels Alliance in 2023, and the Voice of the Global South Summit as a standing format.
• “One Earth, One Family, One Future” — the theme India gave its G20 presidency — is the current formulation. It restates Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam in a language a G20 communiqué can carry, which is exactly the translation India’s position requires.

The doctrinal continuity is real, and it is the strongest thing India has. What changed across seventy-five years is not the claim but the capacity to act on it.

The Development Compact: India’s Own Conceptual Contribution

Most countries that give development assistance describe what they do in categories borrowed from the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD. India does not, and the alternative it uses is not improvised — it was worked out by India’s own development-cooperation think tank and then adopted at the highest political level.

The concept

• The Development Compact is the proposition that Southern development cooperation should be understood as a package of instruments offered together, rather than as a flow of money measured by volume. Its distinctiveness lies in the combination, not in any single element.
• It was articulated as an analytical construct by the Research and Information System for Developing Countries in New Delhi, and it is the clearest example of an Indian institution supplying a category that the international development literature did not previously have.
• Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Global Development Compact at the third Voice of the Global South Summit on 17 August 2024, converting the analytical frame into a declared policy offer.

“We will focus on trade for development, capacity building for sustainable growth, technology sharing, project specific concessional finance and Grants.” — Narendra Modi

The five instruments

Instrument	What it consists of	Why it matters to the model
Capacity building	Training slots, deputation of Indian experts, study visits, institution building	The oldest and cheapest instrument; produces alumni inside partner administrations
Trade for development	Market access, duty-free preference for least developed countries, investment promotion	Makes the relationship commercial rather than charitable
Technology sharing	Joint research, co-creation, transfer of systems rather than sale of products	Where the digital public infrastructure offer sits
Project-specific concessional finance	Lines of credit on concessional terms, tied to defined projects	The largest instrument by value; the mechanics belong to the Africa partnership record
Grants	Grant projects, in-kind assistance, humanitarian and disaster relief	Small in value, disproportionately visible

• The instruments are described as interchangeable and demand-driven: the partner country states what it wants, and the mix is assembled around the request rather than imposed on it.
• Demand-driven is the load-bearing word. In the DAC model the provider identifies the development problem, designs the intervention and evaluates the result. In the Compact model the partner does the first two and there is often no third.

Against the donor model

Dimension	OECD-DAC practice	India’s Development Compact
Relationship	Donor and recipient	Partners, both developing
Conditionality	Policy conditions on governance, macroeconomic management, human rights	None attached
Ownership	Provider-designed programmes within country strategies	Partner identifies the project
Procurement	Increasingly untied	Tied — a substantial Indian-content requirement on credit-financed projects
Administrative charge	Overheads commonly borne by the recipient	Project assistance carries no administrative charge on the recipient
Statistics	Standardised, comparable, published annually	Fragmentary; approvals published rather than disbursements
Evaluation	Independent evaluation offices, published impact assessments	Effectively absent

What India gives up by refusing the framework

The refusal is principled and it is also expensive, and the article that only states the first half is not describing the policy.

• No comparable statistics. Because India does not report against DAC definitions, there is no figure for Indian development cooperation that can be set beside anyone else’s with confidence. Different official statements produce different totals for the same programmes.
• Approvals are published; disbursements are not. The gap between what is announced and what actually moves is invisible from outside — and where it has been reconstructed, in the African line-of-credit portfolio, it is large.
• No impact evaluation. There is no Indian equivalent of an independent evaluation department publishing what worked and what did not. A demand-driven model that never asks whether the demand was well-judged has no learning mechanism.
• A real accountability deficit, to Indian taxpayers as much as to partners. Parliament cannot scrutinise what is not measured; partners cannot benchmark what is not reported.
• The defence is coherent: measurement regimes are themselves instruments of power, the DAC categories were built to describe a donor relationship India rejects, and reporting into them would concede the frame. The rejoinder is that the absence of measurement protects the provider, not the partner.

Refusing the donor’s categories is a defensible act of self-definition; refusing to count is a different decision, and it is the one that costs India credibility.

ITEC: The Flagship of Southern Capacity Building

The Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation programme is treated here as India’s principal global instrument of South-South capacity building — its African record and the goodwill argument are the subject of the development-partnership article and are not rebuilt here.

Scale and reach

• Instituted in 1964, formally launched on 15 September of that year, which makes it one of the oldest continuously running capacity-building programmes operated by any state.
• More than 200,000 officials trained, drawn from more than 160 partner countries, in both civilian and defence streams.
• Roughly 10,000 fully funded in-person training slots a year, delivered through about 400 courses at more than 100 institutions across India, with the course calendar published in advance and slots allocated by country.
• Around 40% of the ITEC budget goes to project assistance rather than to training — a proportion that is regularly overlooked because the training half is the visible half.
• Reported spending figures differ across official statements and should be treated with care; the participation figures are the robust ones.

The modalities

• Capacity building. Three sub-instruments: training slots in Indian vocational and human-resource institutions; deputation of Indian experts to partner countries to train local personnel in place; and study visits by senior political leaders and decision-makers, which is a diplomatic instrument as much as a technical one.
• Project assistance. Concentrated in small and medium industry — agricultural processing, manufacture of agricultural tools, carpentry, plastic moulding, brick-making. The ITEC Division handles project identification, feasibility and implementation and the training of local staff to run the facility afterwards.
• Institution building. The most durable modality: vocational and entrepreneurship development institutes, and specialised centres in agriculture and animal husbandry, information technology and business management. Training an official produces an official; building an institute produces a training capacity that outlasts the grant.
• Scholarships. Graduate and postgraduate places in Indian universities, administered largely through the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. The instructive detail is that self-financing placements by foreign students in Indian universities now run at several times the number of government-funded scholarships — the private flow has overtaken the public one.
• Its other standing components are gifting of equipment, consultancy and disaster relief, which is where the first-responder record connects to the capacity-building one.

The newer delivery tracks

• e-ITEC — online delivery, built out during the pandemic when in-person travel stopped and used to train close to ten thousand professionals in healthcare and governance in a single year. It survived the emergency that created it and is now a standing channel.
• ITEC Onsite — courses delivered in the partner country by Indian faculty, which removes the visa, travel and cost barriers that ration the in-person programme.
• ITEC Executive — short, senior-level programmes for officials too senior to be released for a three-month course in India.
• Customised country-specific programmes, designed on request outside the published calendar, which is the operational expression of the demand-driven principle.

The point that separates it from aid

• India’s project assistance is not loaded with administrative expenses to be borne by the recipient — a common practice in OECD aid. This is a small technical fact that carries a large argument: the overhead is absorbed by the provider, so the partner’s contribution is not consumed by the cost of administering the gift.
• The programme is free at the point of use in a fuller sense than most training assistance: travel, tuition, accommodation and a stipend are covered.

“Our offer of development aid, our development model is not based on ‘give and take’, but is guided by the developmental requirements of partner countries.”

— Narendra Modi

Assessment

• What it buys is disproportionate to what it costs. Sixty years of alumni sitting in the middle and senior ranks of partner administrations is an asset no infrastructure project generates, and it is the single clearest case where India’s model outperforms a better-funded rival.
• What it does not do is scale. Ten thousand slots a year across 160 countries is roughly sixty places per country — real, but thin against the size of the skills deficit it addresses.
• It is also unmeasured. There is no published tracer study of what ITEC alumni went on to do, so the strongest claim India makes for the programme rests on impression rather than evidence.

India’s Global South Leadership: The Instruments

Between 2023 and 2024 India assembled something it had not previously had — a standing format in which the developing world meets without the developed world present, convened by India. Whether that amounts to leadership is a separate question, taken up after the record is set out.

The Voice of the Global South Summit

• A virtual summit format created by India in January 2023, held three times and no more. There have been exactly three editions; there has been no fourth.

Edition	Date	Character
First	12–13 January 2023	125 countries; convened at the start of India’s G20 presidency to gather Southern priorities before the agenda was set; ten sessions, opened and closed by the Prime Minister at leaders’ level
Second	17 November 2023	Convened after the New Delhi G20 Summit to report the outcomes back; theme “Together, For Everyone’s Growth, With Everyone’s Trust”; ten sessions
Third	17 August 2024	Theme “An Empowered Global South for a Sustainable Future”; 173 dignitaries from 123 countries, including 21 heads of state or government and 34 foreign ministers; ten ministerial sessions

• The sequencing of the first two is the design, and it is genuinely clever. India consulted the South before the G20 agenda was fixed and reported back after the summit delivered. It converted a rotating presidency into a mandate, which no previous holder of the presidency had attempted.
• The format’s weakness is equally structural. It is virtual, convened at India’s discretion, with no secretariat, no membership and no decision rule, and it has not met since August 2024. A platform that exists only when its convener calls it is an instrument of Indian diplomacy before it is an institution of the South.

What the first summit launched

• DAKSHIN — the Development and Knowledge Sharing Initiative, Global South Centre of Excellence. Announced at the first summit in January 2023 and formally inaugurated at the second on 17 November 2023, hosted at India’s development-cooperation think tank in New Delhi. Its mandate is to identify mutually agreed projects across the Global South and to support peer learning between developing countries.
• The Global South Young Diplomats Forum, connecting junior foreign-ministry officers across developing countries — a long-horizon investment in exactly the way ITEC is.
• The Global South Science and Technology Initiative, offering Indian expertise in digital public infrastructure, space technology, financial technology and renewable energy.
• Aarogya Maitri, a standing commitment to supply essential medicines and medical consumables to developing countries facing natural disasters or humanitarian crises.
• Global South Scholarships for higher education in India, layered on top of the existing scholarship flow.

The G20 presidency of 2023 and the hardest result available

• India held the G20 presidency through 2023 and hosted the Leaders’ Summit in New Delhi on 9–10 September 2023 under the theme “One Earth, One Family, One Future”.
• The African Union was admitted as a permanent member of the G20 at that summit, on India’s proposal. This is the single hardest piece of evidence in the entire record: fifty-five African states acquired a permanent seat at the table where the world’s macroeconomic and financial agenda is set, and they acquired it because India put it on the agenda and drove it through.
• The New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration was adopted by consensus at a moment when consensus looked unavailable — the war in Ukraine had broken the G20’s ministerial meetings for eighteen months. The compromise language was an Indian drafting achievement, and it demonstrated that a Southern presidency could hold a divided grouping together.
• The Global Biofuels Alliance was launched at the summit on 9 September 2023, and the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor was announced alongside it.

The India–UN Development Partnership Fund

• Established in 2017 with the UN Office for South-South Cooperation, entirely funded by India and administered on South-South principles.
• US$150 million committed over ten years, with earmarked windows: $50 million for a Commonwealth window, $14 million for the Caribbean Community, and $12 million for Pacific island developing states.
• Demand-driven by construction. Governments submit proposals through their permanent missions to India’s mission in New York; a board comprising India’s deputy permanent representative, the relevant joint secretary and the head of the UN office approves them on a rolling basis; UN agencies implement in partnership with the requesting government.
• Focused on least developed countries, landlocked developing countries and small island developing states, with a portfolio spanning all seventeen Sustainable Development Goals — climate resilience, renewable energy, health, education, water and sanitation, livelihoods and gender.
• This is triangular cooperation in its purest Indian form: Indian money, UN delivery machinery, partner-country ownership — and it lets India reach dozens of small states it has no bilateral capacity to serve.

Vaccine Maitri and health diplomacy

• Begun on 20 January 2021, four days after India started vaccinating its own population — a sequencing India used, correctly, as evidence of intent.
• Roughly 163 million doses supplied to about a hundred countries by early 2022, of which about 14 million were outright grants, the remainder commercial supply and deliveries through the international procurement facility.
• The record includes its interruption and should be stated with it. Exports were suspended in the spring of 2021 when India’s own second wave overwhelmed the country, and resumed only in October. Partners who had been promised doses were left without them.
• The honest reading is that Vaccine Maitri was both genuine and fragile: a real transfer at real cost, made by a state whose domestic needs could override it without notice. That is the structural condition of a middle-income provider, and it is not a moral failing — but it is a limit on what partners can rely on.
• India also co-authored, with South Africa, the October 2020 proposal for a waiver of intellectual-property obligations on COVID-19 vaccines — the trade-negotiation dimension of which belongs to the World Trade Organization record.

First-responder diplomacy

• Disaster relief has the best ratio of effect to expenditure in the whole portfolio. Indian naval and air assets have repeatedly arrived first, and arriving first is remembered.
• The pattern is consistent across two decades of tsunami, cyclone, earthquake and epidemic response, and is institutionalised through Aarogya Maitri and the disaster-relief head within ITEC.
• It also cuts across the South-South frame, because India responds to developed-country emergencies too — evidence that its assistance is not a bloc instrument.

Digital public infrastructure

• The most distinctive thing India currently offers, and the only one no other provider offers in the same form. Identity, payments and data-exchange systems, developed at national scale in India, offered as replicable public goods with the source made available rather than as procured proprietary systems.
• It was placed at the centre of the G20 presidency’s development agenda and is carried forward through the Global South Science and Technology Initiative.
• The strategic significance is that it inverts the usual asymmetry. In infrastructure India cannot match Chinese scale; in population-scale digital public systems India has an operating record no other country has, and the transfer costs it almost nothing.

The instruments are real, they are recent, and they are largely India’s own design — which is why the interesting question is not whether they exist but whether they add up to leadership.

The Critical Account

A critical account of India’s role in the affairs of the developing world is not a list of shortcomings appended to a list of achievements. It is a set of arguments about whether the role India claims is the role India performs.

Convening is not delivering

• India is unusually good at creating formats and unusually slow at executing inside them. The Voice of the Global South Summit, the Global Development Compact, DAKSHIN, the science and technology initiative and the scholarships were announced within nineteen months of each other; the evidence of what they have delivered since is thin.
• The disbursement problem is the sharpest version of this. Where the record can be reconstructed — the African concessional-lending portfolio — money actually moved at a fraction of what was announced, and the reporting convention of publishing approvals rather than disbursements conceals the gap.
• Summits have lapsed before. The India–Africa Forum Summit has not met since 2015 and has been postponed three times; the Voice of the Global South Summit has not met since August 2024. Formats that depend on political attention decay when attention moves.

Speaking for the South while negotiating for itself

• The charge is that India uses Southern solidarity as leverage for Indian objectives. It is not baseless. India’s Security Council candidacy, its pursuit of membership of the export-control regimes, and its bilateral trade bargaining are Indian interests advanced with Southern numbers behind them.
• India’s own trade positions do not always align with the South’s. On agricultural market access India is a defensive power while much of Africa and Latin America is offensive; on services and the movement of professionals India is a demandeur where most least developed countries are not; on tariff preferences India both grants and seeks them.
• On the currency question India has been explicit that it will not follow the bloc. When de-dollarisation was pushed inside BRICS, India’s stated position was that it would remain within the existing financial architecture — a defensible national judgement, and one that made plain that India’s Southern commitments stop where its exposure to the American financial system begins.

Nobody asked India to lead

• No Southern state, group or institution has conferred on India a mandate to speak for the Global South. India appointed itself, and the appointment is noticed.
• The resentment of a self-appointed spokesman is a real diplomatic cost, particularly among states that are larger in their own regions than India’s framing allows for.
• There are other claimants, and each has an argument.

Claimant	The case for it	The case against it
China	Overwhelming resources; the largest South-South financing and trade programme by an order of magnitude; a permanent Security Council seat	A trade surplus with almost every partner; debt exposure controversies; not a democracy, which limits its appeal in plural societies
Brazil	Democratic legitimacy; agricultural and environmental weight; a persuasive record in trade negotiation	Discontinuity across governments; limited financing capacity; regional rather than global reach
South Africa	Moral standing from the anti-apartheid struggle; direct access to the African Union; the 2025 G20 presidency, the first on African soil	A small economy with severe domestic constraints; contested legitimacy as Africa’s voice
Indonesia	The largest Muslim-majority democracy; ASEAN’s centre of gravity; Bandung’s own host, now a BRICS member	Historically reticent about global leadership; limited development-cooperation programme
India	Scale, a functioning democracy, a development record built under constraint, the widest capacity-building network, and no history of coercive lending	Cannot finance a redistributive agenda; simultaneous Northern partnerships; self-appointment

• The leadership is therefore contested, and it is contested by states India needs. Treating the Global South as a bloc India leads is the error; it is a coalition India convenes, and convening power lasts only as long as the convening is useful to the others.

Leadership of the South is not a title anyone can award; it is a position that has to be re-earned at every meeting.

IBSA: The Only Room Without China In It

Why it was founded, and when

• The IBSA Dialogue Forum was created by the Brasília Declaration of 6 June 2003, signed by the foreign ministers of India, Brazil and South Africa in the Brazilian capital.
• Its immediate cause was disappointment. The Doha Development Agenda had been launched in 2001 with development at its centre; by 2003 the developed world’s implementation had stalled, and the three concluded they would have to coordinate their own position rather than wait for the round to deliver one.
• The founding logic was therefore negotiating, not sentimental. IBSA was built as a caucus of three large developing economies that could act together where each acting alone had failed.

What makes the combination unique

• Three large, plural democracies from three different continents — Asia, South America and Africa — each a regional power in its own neighbourhood, and all three developing, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious.
• No other Southern grouping combines regional weight with democratic legitimacy across three continents. BRICS has more resources and no shared political form; the Non-Aligned Movement has numbers and no capacity; the G-77 has universality and no cohesion.
• Each brings something the others do not.

Member	What it brings
India	The world’s largest democracy; technical capability; low-cost pharmaceuticals and health products; solar deployment at scale
Brazil	An agricultural giant; a decisive voice in trade negotiation; leadership on tropical forests and biofuels
South Africa	A global influencer on environmental questions; direct access to the African Union, which no other member of any Southern grouping has

The three-track mechanism

• Track one — political consultation and coordination. Joint positions on reform of global governance institutions, the World Trade Organization and the Doha agenda, climate change and terrorism. This is where IBSA has been most consistently active and least visible.
• Track two — trilateral cooperation. Fourteen working groups and six people-to-people forums covering agriculture, education, energy, science and technology, trade, transport, health, culture, public administration and defence — the machinery through which the three administrations actually know each other.
• Track three — assistance to other developing countries, delivered through the IBSA Fund. This is the track that makes IBSA a provider of South-South cooperation rather than only a consumer of the concept.

The IBSA Fund

• Created in March 2004 and operational from 2006, formally the India, Brazil and South Africa Facility for Poverty and Hunger Alleviation, and managed with the UN Office for South-South Cooperation.
• Financed by equal annual contributions from the three members — the equality of contribution is doctrinal, since a fund in which one member paid more would reproduce the donor relationship the grouping exists to reject.
• Cumulative figures reported by the members run to more than US$44 million disbursed across roughly 35 projects in about 31 countries, with India’s own cumulative contribution reported at around US$15 million. Figures published by the managing UN office at different dates are lower and count differently; treat the totals as approximate and the direction as clear.
• It seeks replicable and scalable projects that can be disseminated to other developing countries on a demand-driven basis — the fund is explicitly a demonstration mechanism, not a relief mechanism.
• It remains active. The Fund’s board met in New York on 17 June 2026, marking twenty years since operationalisation, and approved new projects for Eswatini, Timor-Leste, Guatemala, and Botswana and Namibia jointly, the last on critical-mineral value chains for inclusive industrialisation — which is the fund reaching into exactly the sector the three members care most about.
• Its scale is the point and the problem. Forty-four million dollars over twenty years is a rounding error in development finance. What it buys is not development but proof of concept: three Southern states jointly financing and delivering in a third country.

IBSAMAR

• The trilateral naval exercise, running since 2008 and held in South African waters most times it has been held.
• IBSAMAR VIII took place off Simon’s Town, South Africa, from 6 to 18 October 2024, with INS Talwar representing the Indian Navy.
• The programme covered damage control and firefighting, visit-board-search-and-seizure drills, cross-boarding, joint diving operations, special-forces interaction and an ocean-governance seminar in harbour, and blue-water surface and anti-air warfare at sea.
• It is the most tangible thing IBSA does. Three navies operating together across the South Atlantic and the western Indian Ocean is a capability, not a communiqué, and it maps onto the ocean space where all three members’ interests converge.

The ministerial series, and the gap that explains everything

• Thirteen trilateral ministerial commission meetings have been held since 2003, the foreign ministers meeting most often on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York.
• The seventh meeting was in 2011 and the eighth in 2017 — a six-year gap. Nothing was formally suspended; the grouping simply stopped meeting.
• The last leaders’ summit was held in 2011. IBSA has not met at head-of-government level for fifteen years, which for a forum designed around political consultation is a severe verdict.
• The recovery since 2017 has been real but ministerial only. The thirteenth meeting was held in New York on 26 September 2025, and the standing themes of the communiqués have been consistent: universal health coverage; coordination across the UN, the WTO and the G20; reform of the multilateral trading system; sovereign equality and non-interference; frustration at the slow pace of negotiations on Security Council reform; the Paris Agreement; and condemnation of terrorism.
• Brazil assumed the IBSA chair in March 2023, as the grouping passed twenty years.

Why IBSA faded: BRICS crowded it out

The honest answer to how India pursues its objectives through IBSA is that for long stretches it has not, and the reasons are more instructive than the achievements.

• South Africa joined BRIC in December 2010, and IBSA’s three members were suddenly all inside a larger grouping. Every IBSA agenda item — Security Council reform, trade, climate, development finance — could now be raised in a forum with Russia and China in it, more money behind it and far more attention on it.
• The New Development Bank did to the IBSA Fund what BRICS did to IBSA. A bank with US$100 billion of authorised capital makes a $44 million facility look ceremonial, whatever its qualitative distinctiveness.
• Ministerial bandwidth is finite. BRICS, the G20, the Quad and the bilateral programme all compete for a foreign minister’s week at the General Assembly, and the trilateral with the smallest deliverables loses.
• Domestic discontinuity in two of the three members — leadership changes in Brazil and in South Africa — repeatedly interrupted the summit cycle.

The case for reviving it

• IBSA is the only vehicle in which India, Brazil and South Africa coordinate without China in the room. That is not an incidental feature; it is the entire remaining value of the format.
• Inside BRICS, the three are a minority. On Security Council reform, on the character of the trading system, on the treatment of democratic norms and on the pace of de-dollarisation, the three democracies want things that the two permanent members of the Security Council inside BRICS do not.
• It is the only grouping whose members are all democracies and all Southern. That combination is scarce, and it is the credential India needs when it argues that the South’s future need not be authoritarian.
• It is the natural caucus for Security Council reform. India, Brazil and South Africa are all aspirants; two sit in the G4 and the third carries the African position. Coordination among them is worth more than coordination in a forum containing the states that would have to approve their entry.
• The realistic prescription is modest and therefore achievable: restore the leaders’ summit, raise the Fund’s annual contribution above the symbolic, keep IBSAMAR biennial, and work the health, agriculture and digital groups where the three are genuinely complementary.

IBSA’s weakness is that it duplicates BRICS; IBSA’s value is precisely the two members BRICS has that IBSA does not.

RIS: The Think Tank Behind the Doctrine

What it is

• The Research and Information System for Developing Countries — an autonomous think tank based in New Delhi, funded by and reporting to the Ministry of External Affairs, established in 1983.
• The institution is for Developing Countries, not for development as a policy field, and the distinction matters because the mandate is about a category of states rather than a category of policy.
• Its three founding research areas are international economic development; trade and investment; and technology — the three fields in which the North-South gap is actually contested.
• It describes itself today as a think tank of the Global South, and its current research pillars are global economic governance and cooperation; trade, investment and economic cooperation; trade facilitation and regional connectivity; and new technologies and development issues.

What it actually does for India’s Southern diplomacy

• It supplies the concepts. The Development Compact — the frame in which India describes its entire development-cooperation offer, and which the Global Development Compact of 2024 turned into declared policy — originated here. A state’s ability to describe its own practice in categories it has authored is an under-rated form of power, and this is India’s clearest instance of it.
• It hosts DAKSHIN, the Global South Centre of Excellence announced at the first Voice of the Global South Summit in January 2023 and inaugurated at the second in November 2023 — which places the think tank at the operational centre of the Global South platform, not merely commenting on it.
• It services the Forum for Indian Development Cooperation, the standing platform on which India’s own development-cooperation practitioners, officials and researchers meet.
• It hosts the Network of Southern Think Tanks, the attempt to build a Southern research community capable of generating its own evidence base rather than importing Northern evaluation frameworks — the intellectual counterpart to refusing the DAC categories.
• It runs the Delhi Process conference series on South-South and triangular cooperation, which is the recurring convening event of the field in India.
• It provides analytical support to Indian negotiators in comprehensive economic cooperation agreements with partner countries — the unglamorous function that most matters, because negotiating capacity is the scarcest resource developing countries have.
• It runs the Track II process for several regional initiatives, and hosts specialised centres including the ASEAN-India Centre, a Forum on Indian Traditional Medicine, and a maritime economy and connectivity centre.
• It carries the BRICS think-tank networks on India’s side and publishes flagship reports on world trade and development, triangular cooperation, and India’s partnerships in the Global South.

Assessment

• The case for it is convening power and continuity. Its output is genuinely analytical, its networks are real, and it has supplied the vocabulary in which India’s development partnership is now discussed internationally. Very few developing countries have an institution that does this.
• It is also cheap. A think tank costs a fraction of a project, and the return — a category adopted into national policy, a Southern research network, a permanent Track II channel — is disproportionate.
• The case against is the structural limitation of a state-funded think tank as an instrument of soft power. An institution funded by and reporting to the foreign ministry cannot easily publish a finding the foreign ministry would rather not read. Its independence is a matter of practice and personality rather than of design.
• This bites hardest where India most needs it. The accountability deficit in India’s development cooperation — no disbursement data, no impact evaluation — is the question its leading development-cooperation institute is least placed to press, because the answer would embarrass its funder.
• The honest conclusion is that it is a major initiative and a partial one: an excellent producer of concepts, convening and negotiating support, and a weak substitute for independent evaluation.

BRICS and the New Development Bank

BRICS is the largest institution India has joined rather than founded, and it is treated here for what it contributes to South-South cooperation rather than as a subject in itself.

Membership, and the sequence

• The sequence begins in 2006. The first BRIC foreign ministers’ meeting was held on the margins of the UN General Assembly in September 2006; a standalone foreign ministers’ meeting followed in May 2008, before the financial crisis peaked; and the first leaders’ summit was held at Yekaterinburg in June 2009.
• South Africa acceded in December 2010, making the grouping BRICS, and attended its first summit as a member at Sanya in April 2011 — the accession date and that first-summit date are frequently confused.
• Four members joined in January 2024 — Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Indonesia joined in January 2025, taking the membership to ten.
• Saudi Arabia was invited and has not joined. Argentina withdrew in December 2023 after a change of government. Both facts belong in any assessment of how attractive the grouping actually is.
• A partner-country tier was created at the Kazan summit in October 2024, admitting states that engage with BRICS activity without full membership — among them Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Türkiye, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
• The seventeenth summit was held in Rio de Janeiro on 6–7 July 2025, under the theme of strengthening Global South cooperation and more inclusive global governance. It is worth noting who was absent: neither the Chinese president nor the Russian president attended in person, which is not the attendance record of a grouping its members regard as decisive.
• The bloc’s weight is real: roughly a quarter of the world’s land surface, some 45% of its population and about 30% of world output, or 36% in purchasing-power terms — above the G7’s combined share on that measure. Two members hold permanent Security Council seats and three more are aspirants, which is itself a source of friction.

India’s chairmanship

• India chairs BRICS through 2026 and will host the eighteenth summit in New Delhi on 12–13 September 2026, as the grouping marks two decades.
• The theme is “BRICS — Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”, launched with the chairmanship logo and website by the External Affairs Minister on 13 January 2026. The BRICS foreign ministers met in Delhi on 14–15 May 2026 in preparation.
• India has framed its chairmanship around reformed multilateralism rather than around confrontation, which is consistent with everything else in its Southern portfolio.
• The summit has not yet taken place, and no outcome should be attributed to it.

The New Development Bank

• Agreed at the fifth BRICS summit in 2013, signed in 2014 and formally established in 2015, headquartered in Shanghai, with regional offices in Johannesburg, São Paulo, Ahmedabad and Moscow.
• Authorised capital of US$100 billion; initial subscribed capital of US$50 billion, of which $10 billion paid in, divided equally among the five founders — so each founder holds approximately equal voting share, and the founders together retain a floor of 55% of voting power.
• Equal shares are the institutional argument. The bank was built as an answer to weighted voting at the Bretton Woods institutions, and equality of shareholding among founders is the design feature that makes the answer credible.
• Membership has widened to ten: the five founders from 3 July 2015, then Bangladesh (16 September 2021), the United Arab Emirates (4 October 2021), Egypt (20 February 2023), Algeria (19 May 2025) and Uzbekistan (5 June 2026), the first Central Asian member. Colombia, Uruguay, Ethiopia, Angola and Zimbabwe have been admitted by the Board of Governors but have not deposited instruments of accession — admitted is not member.
• Lending record: 139 projects approved, worth about US$42.9 billion, in transport, clean energy, water and sanitation, digital infrastructure, environmental protection and social infrastructure.
• The local-currency mandate is the bank’s most consequential and least delivered commitment. Lending in members’ own currencies removes exchange-rate risk from borrowers and is the practical version of de-dollarisation; the share of the portfolio actually denominated in local currency has consistently lagged the stated target.
• The Contingent Reserve Arrangement, agreed alongside the bank, is a US$100 billion swap facility among the founders, available to a member facing balance-of-payments pressure. It is the reserve-side counterpart to the bank’s project lending, it has never been drawn on, and it remains partially linked to an IMF programme beyond a threshold — which limits how far it is genuinely an alternative.

The debate, with sides

Position	The argument	Who makes it
BRICS marks a real transition	Its founding signalled a post-American world order and the decline of the West relative to the rest; the centre of economic gravity has moved	Fareed Zakaria
BRICS is materially formidable	The bloc holds 45% of the world’s oil reserves and 56% of gas reserves; Russia alone accounts for half of world enriched-uranium production, and Russia and China together for about 70% of uranium production	Marco Fernandes
Enlargement is geo-economic, not ideological	The new members’ admission has geo-economic, geostrategic and geopolitical implications and is “very energy centric”, pushing members to rethink their West Asia policies	Sanusha Naidu
Enlargement weakens rather than strengthens it	Adding Egypt and Ethiopia, already in dispute over the Nile, on top of the existing India–China confrontation, makes consensus harder; BRICS risks becoming a theatre of contestation itself rather than a challenger to the West	C. Raja Mohan, in BRICS Expansion is no Triumph for China
BRICS is a “motley cow”	Too heterogeneous to decide anything; intra-BRICS trade is only about 6.5% of members’ total trade, and members are more economically interdependent with the United States and Europe than with each other; of the expanded group, some are democracies, some autocracies, one a monarchy and one a theocracy	Western sceptics
BRICS is simply a fact	It is no longer an alternative; it is an established feature of the global landscape	S. Jaishankar

• The strongest sceptical point is the trade figure. A grouping whose members trade overwhelmingly with the states it is supposed to balance has limited coercive capacity, whatever its share of reserves.
• The strongest reply is that BRICS was never a trade bloc. It is an agenda-setting and institution-building forum, and by that standard a bank with a $43 billion portfolio, a swap arrangement and a permanent summit calendar is a substantial output for two decades.

De-dollarisation, and India’s position

• The idea of a BRICS currency has been discussed and has not advanced. The Kazan summit in October 2024 introduced BRICS Pay, a cross-border settlement concept intended as an alternative channel to the existing messaging system, and agreed to study the feasibility of an autonomous cross-border settlement system.
• In February 2025 the United States President threatened 100% tariffs on members that created a new BRICS currency, telling them to expect to say goodbye to selling into the American economy.
• Jaishankar’s response was that India will remain under the American financial architecture — an unusually blunt statement of national position against a grouping’s declared direction.
• Shashi Tharoor argued that the threat was empty, like many others, while noting that the dollar remains a practical convenience for most of the world.
• The Brazilian central bank’s own leadership dismissed near-term de-dollarisation, citing the absence of sizeable, reliable reserves among BRICS members as the binding obstacle. When the host country’s monetary authority says the project is not feasible, the project is not feasible.

India’s position that BRICS is not anti-Western — argued, not asserted

The claim is made so routinely that it has stopped being examined. It is defensible, but only on evidence.

• The membership contains two states in open confrontation with the West and one, India, in deep partnership with it. India’s simultaneous membership of the Quad, its technology partnerships with the United States, its trade negotiations with the European Union and the United Kingdom, and its defence procurement from France are not the portfolio of an anti-Western state, and they are visible to every other member.
• India has consistently blocked or diluted the anti-Western drafting. The currency question is the clearest case: India refused the de-dollarisation direction outright, in public, at ministerial level.
• India pushed enlargement partly to dilute Chinese dominance. A grouping of five in which China is the largest economy by a factor of five is a Chinese instrument; a grouping of ten with several states carrying their own agendas is harder for any one member to steer. This is the strongest structural evidence that India’s BRICS policy is about balance inside the group rather than confrontation outside it.
• The functional agenda is not oppositional. Development finance, local-currency lending, health cooperation, artificial-intelligence governance and Security Council reform are demands for inclusion in the existing order on better terms, not for its replacement.
• The honest qualification is that India does not control the framing. Russia and Iran have every incentive to present BRICS as a counter-Western bloc, and communiqué language reflects the compromise. India’s position is a genuine national one; it is not the grouping’s settled character, and India’s ability to keep it that way is exactly what its 2026 chairmanship will test.

The Coalitions India Built Rather Than Joined

The newest layer of India’s Southern policy is the least documented and the most strategically significant. Between 2015 and 2023 India stopped being a member of Southern institutions designed by others and began founding its own — each organised around a single issue on which India had a demonstrable domestic record.

The International Solar Alliance

• Announced by the Indian Prime Minister and the French President at the Paris climate conference in November 2015, with the framework agreement opened for signature at Marrakesh in November 2016.
• Headquartered at Gwal Pahari, Gurugram, on land and with buildings provided by India — the first treaty-based international organisation to be headquartered in India, which is itself the point.
• Originally restricted to states lying wholly or partly between the Tropics, and opened to all United Nations member states by an amendment effective in 2020 — a deliberate universalisation that turned a Southern club into a global body India happens to host.
• More than 120 member and signatory countries. African states are its largest regional bloc; its own leadership has described roughly half the membership as African.
• Its programmes are practical rather than declaratory: aggregated demand and procurement, a solar risk-mitigation facility, training centres in partner countries, and the One Sun One World One Grid proposition.
• India’s concessional credit for off-grid solar in Africa is channelled through it, which makes the alliance a delivery mechanism and not only a forum.

The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure

• Launched by India at the United Nations Climate Action Summit on 23 September 2019, with a secretariat in New Delhi and an Indian contribution of about ₹480 crore to its corpus.
• A partnership of national governments, UN agencies and programmes, multilateral development banks and financing mechanisms, the private sector and knowledge institutions — the multi-stakeholder form rather than the intergovernmental one.
• Three strategic priorities: technical support and capacity building (disaster response and recovery support, innovation, institutional and community capacity, standards and certification); research and knowledge management (collaborative research, global flagship reports, a global database of infrastructure resilience); and advocacy and partnerships (global events, a marketplace of knowledge, financing and implementation agencies, and dissemination).
• Accorded the status of an International Organization by the Government of India through a Headquarters Agreement in August 2022 — the legal step that gave it privileges and immunities and made it something more than an Indian programme with foreign members.
• Membership has grown to around seventy countries and organisations, running more than 180 active projects. Members include the United States, Canada, Brazil, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, Germany, Italy and the European Union alongside Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Fiji, Mauritius and the Maldives.
• South Africa and China are notable non-members — the first a fellow IBSA and BRICS partner, the second India’s principal rival for Southern leadership. Their absence tells you that Indian-founded institutions attract Northern and small-island members more readily than they attract India’s Southern peers.
• Its Infrastructure for Resilient Island States initiative directs the coalition’s work at small island developing states, where the disaster-resilience argument is least contested.

The Global Biofuels Alliance

• Launched at the New Delhi G20 Summit on 9 September 2023, co-founded by India, Brazil and the United States — the world’s three largest biofuel producers and consumers.
• Founded with 22 member countries and 12 international organisations; membership has since passed 34 countries and 14 organisations.
• Its purpose is to accelerate sustainable biofuels and set standards and certification — standard-setting being the form of power that matters most in a new market and the one developing countries almost never get to exercise.
• India brought a domestic record to the table: it reached 20% ethanol blending in 2025, five years ahead of its own target, which is the credential that made the founding claim credible.
• It is the clearest example of the pattern. India identified a field in which its record was strong, recruited the two other producers that mattered, and used a G20 presidency to launch a body in which it is a founder rather than an applicant.

The others, and the pattern

• The Indian Ocean Rim Association is the older instance — a grouping of Indian Ocean littoral states in which India is the largest member, working on maritime safety, trade facilitation, fisheries and the blue economy.

Generation	Vehicles	India’s role	What it costs India	What India gets
Inherited, 1955–1970s	Bandung, G-77, NAM, UNCTAD	Founding member among many	Little	Numbers and legitimacy; no control
Joined, 1990s–2010s	BRICS, IBSA, the NDB, the WTO coalitions	One member among peers	Contributions and negotiating time	Leverage; agenda shared with others
Founded, 2015 onward	ISA, CDRI, GBA, VOGSS, the Development Compact	Convener, host, largest contributor	Secretariats, corpus funding, sustained attention	Agenda-setting, standard-setting, and an institutional home on Indian soil

• The strategic logic is that founding is cheaper than competing. India cannot outspend China on infrastructure, but it can create the body that writes the resilience standard, hosts the solar procurement platform and certifies the biofuel — and standards outlast projects.
• The risk is a proliferation of thinly resourced secretariats. Each needs money, staff and ministerial attention indefinitely; India has founded four in eight years and has not shown it can sustain all of them at the level it launched them.

What South-South Cooperation Has Delivered for India, and What It Has Cost

The returns, stated concretely

• Votes and diplomatic weight. A standing constituency in the General Assembly matters for Security Council reform, for candidatures in UN bodies, and for the numbers behind India’s trade positions.
• Markets. Pharmaceuticals, vehicles, agricultural machinery, information-technology services and now digital systems sell into the same countries the capacity-building programme trains. Development cooperation and commercial policy are the same policy in two registers.
• Standing. The African Union’s G20 seat, a consensus declaration at New Delhi and three Voice of the Global South Summits are a claim to representative authority no other middle power has assembled.
• A distinctive brand. Non-conditionality, capacity over concrete, transferable systems rather than built assets, no record of coercive lending. It is a real differentiation and is recognised as one.
• Insurance against dependence. A Southern portfolio gives India options when Northern relationships turn transactional, which they periodically do.

The costs and constraints

• The resource asymmetry against China is not closeable and should not be denied. China’s trade with Africa alone is several times India’s, its cumulative lending to the continent runs into the hundreds of billions, and its Africa summit has never missed a cycle while India’s has not met since 2015. India competes on model, not on volume, because it has no alternative.
• Delivery and disbursement. Announced credit and delivered credit differ widely; execution capacity is the binding constraint, not the announcement.
• No evaluation, therefore no learning. The absence of impact assessment is the deepest structural weakness, because it means poor projects are not identified and good ones are not replicated.
• Institutional thinness. A development-cooperation administration created in 2012 runs a global programme with a fraction of the staff comparable providers deploy.
• The identity tension is permanent. India sits in the Quad, negotiates technology partnerships with the United States, buys defence equipment from France and Russia, and simultaneously claims to speak for the developing world. Partners notice, and the claim is discounted accordingly.
• Domestic priority competes with external commitment, as Vaccine Maitri demonstrated.

The two arguments that frame the future

• Jaishankar’s three shifts set out what India wants the system to become: from self-centred to human-centred globalisation, with development rather than efficiency as the organising objective; from receiving technological patronage to deploying Global South-led innovation for societal transformation; and from debt-creating projects to demand-driven, sustainable development cooperation. Each shift is a description of what India already does, generalised into a proposal for what everyone should do — which is how a middle power converts practice into norm.
• C. Raja Mohan’s caution is the necessary corrective, and India’s own conduct largely follows it. He argues that India should avoid the temptation of building a bloc against the developed North, and should instead offer sustainable economic cooperation to the Global South through national, regional and global institutions to further joint causes.
• The two positions are compatible, and the compatibility is the doctrine. India argues for a reformed order from inside it, using Southern numbers as leverage and Northern partnerships as capacity, and refuses the choice between them. That refusal is not fence-sitting; it is the only position from which a state of India’s size and stage can actually change anything.

Conclusion

South-South cooperation is the oldest continuous strand in Indian foreign policy and the one with the fewest reversals. The claim — that developing countries should deal with each other as equals, without conditions, to mutual benefit, alongside and not instead of their dealings with the developed world — has been stated in essentially the same terms since 1947.

• What has changed is capacity, not conviction. India spent forty years advocating a doctrine it could barely fund and has spent the last two decades acquiring instruments to practise it: a credit programme, a training network, a fund at the United Nations, a think tank that supplies the concepts, and four international organisations it founded itself.
• The achievements are real and specific: the African Union’s permanent seat at the G20, a consensus declaration when consensus had failed for eighteen months, a solar organisation headquartered in Gurugram, a disaster-resilience coalition with international-organisation status, sixty years of ITEC alumni, and the only trilateral of large Southern democracies that exists.
• The failures are equally specific: money announced and not disbursed, formats convened and not sustained, a fund of forty-four million dollars standing in for a development programme, and a refusal to measure that has hardened into a refusal to be accountable.
• The unresolved question is whether convening power can become delivery capacity. India has proved it can assemble the developing world in a room. It has not yet proved it can give the room a reason to keep coming.
• The strongest thing India has is that its model is genuinely different, and the second strongest is that the difference is one other developing countries can verify from their own experience — no policy conditions, no political demands, no seizure of assets, and personnel trained rather than replaced.

The measure of India’s Southern policy is not how many countries attend when it convenes, but how many still want what it offers when it does not.