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.
China is the harder case. 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.
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.
India’s widening trade deficit with BRICS is a reflection of the asymmetry in India’s current economic integration with the grouping.
Independent estimates broadly track this trend, even where the exact numbers diverge slightly by methodology. It would be easy — and, this week especially, politically convenient — to read the widening gap purely as a warning sign. 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.
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. The growth itself isn’t in question: exports have risen 48.8 per cent to $95.7 billion, while imports have climbed faster, up 131.8 per cent to $321.8 billion. The result is a bloc that 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. 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. But that framing misses the more important structural story, according to Sohom Banerjee, founder of advisory and research firm Quantive Advisory LLP: 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 .
