The BRICS New Delhi Summit: The Way Forward (2012)

New Delhi hosted the fourth summit of (comprising Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa) on 28-29 March 2012. Its theme was BRICS Partnership for Global Stability, Security and Prosperity. Representing their countries were President Dilma Rouseff(Brazil), President Hu Jintao (China), President Dmitry Medvedev (Russia) and President Jacob Zuma (South Africa) and the host, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The countries together constitute 25.9 per cent of the world's geographic area; 43 per cent of the global population; 18 per cent of global trade; and 25 per cent of global GDP in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP). They hold 40 per cent of the world's currency reserves, mostly in US dollars. The US think-tank Hudson Institute's Center for Global Prosperity, citing a World Bank report, has recently claimed that the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has declined from 52 per cent in 1961 to 22 per cent in 2008 thanks to the strong economic growth in the emerging markets of India, Brazil and China. This means that the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of cutting extreme poverty by half by 2015 has already been met.1The group as a political entity acquired resonance and its acronym after the prediction of investment banker Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs in 2001 that the emerging economies of these countries would propel the trajectory of world growth and development. Later in 2003 the predictions were finetuned and packaged in the much-touted Goldman Sachs report authored by Jim O'Neill, Roopa Purushothaman and Dominic Wilson. The report forecast that by 2039 the combined GDP of Brazil, Russia, India and would exceed that of the US, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan combined (the G-6). In 2050 China's GDP would be $44.5 trillion and India's $28 trillion. would be the world's largest economy, and India the thirdlargest. In absolute GDP, by 2015 would forge ahead of Japan. (Far ahead of this forecast, surpassed Japan and became the world's secondlargest economy in 2010.) The Goldman Sachs report further said that the share of the four nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) in the world growth rate would double from 20 per cent in 2003 to 40 per cent in 2050. In oil consumption, India's share could nearly double and gradually converge on China's by 2025. and India together would then account for almost one-third of the global oil demand.President Barack Obama in a speech in New Hampshire in March this year echoed the forecast made in the report when he said:In five years, the number of cars on the roads in more than tripled. Nearly 10 million cars were added in alone in 2010 - 10 million cars just in one country in one year. So that's using up a lot of oil. Those numbers are only going to get bigger over time. As places like and India get wealthier, they're going to want to fill them up like we do, and that's going to drive up demand.2The Goldman Sachs report underscored the tectonic shiftfrom the Atlantic to Asia-Pacific. BRIC was formalized with the first meeting of the Foreign Ministers of Brazil, Russia, India and in New York on the margins of the UN General Assembly meeting in September 2006. The first BRIC summit was held in Yekaterinburg (Russia) in June 2009, the second in Brasilia (Brazil) in April 2010 and the third in Sanya (China) in April 2011.Goldman Sachs' prognosis has been superseded by several other projections in recent times. In 2011 the World Bank in its report Global Development Horizon 2011 noted that six countries - Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Russia - will account for almost half of the world's economic growth by the next fifteen years. This will not only ensure that the centres of economic growth are spread across the world, that no currency will dominate the global economy, and the Chinese Renminbi will assume a greater role. The report added, China and India are likely to be the main flag bearers among emerging market growth poles in the years ahead. …