India backs Brics expansion on consensus basis, says PM

India fully backs the expansion of Brics (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) on the basis of consensus, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a summit of the five-nation bloc on Wednesday in the face of a push by China to enlarge the grouping.

- Rezaul H Laskar

Modi suggested enhanced collaboration between Brics member states in areas such as space, education and technology, including the use of solutions developed by India, can help make the bloc a "future-ready organisation". He offered to share platforms developed by India with other Brics members.

"India fully supports the expansion of Brics membership, and welcomes moving forward on this with consensus," he said, speaking in Hindi at the open plenary session of the summit in Johannesburg. Modi noted that when Brics was chaired by India in 2016, the grouping was defined as "Building Responsive, Inclusive and Collective Solutions".

"After seven years, we can say Brics will be 'Breaking barriers, Revitalising economies, Inspiring innovation, Creating opportunities and Shaping the future"," he said.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, who spoke after Modi at the session, reiterated Beijing's push for speedy expansion of Brics to make global governance more equitable.

"I am glad to see the growing enthusiasm of developing countries about participating in Brics cooperation and quite a number of them have applied to join the Brics cooperation mechanism," Xi said, speaking in Mandarin.

Xi added, "We need to...accelerate the Brics expansion process to bring more countries into the Brics family so as to pool our strengths [and] our wisdom to make global governance more just and equitable."