Terrorism to figure prominently at BRICS leaders' meeting

Terrorism will be figured prominently as the BRICS leaders will be looking at the global economy and political situations and the global growth prospects at the eighth summit to be held in Goa on October 15-16.

Briefing the media here on the upcoming BRICS Summit, Ministry of External Affairs, Secretary, Economic Relations (ER) Amar Sinha said, "We will be looking at the global economy and political situation, and terrorism is a very important part of that. And then, we will look at the global growth prospects - the role of BRICS in leading this global growth and our contributions to it.

"And in a way forward, we will look at BRICS and BRICS' cooperation with other emerging economies, issues of Climate Change, SDGs, financing for development - a key institution we have found as NDB; and how to increase people to people contact. In this connection, there was a major, the first ever, tourism convention that we had organised of all the BRICS countries and we hope to build on this."

Confirming the participation of all the BRICS leaders, Sinha said, "We have confirmation from all the BRICS leaders. But since the last three summits, we have a BRICS outreach, where normally regional countries are invited, and each host decides on who are to be invited and because our look east policy etc, we have decided to invite the group is the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC). So, we have confirmations from all the BIMSTEC partners participating."

The BIMSTEC is group of seven nations of South and South-East Asia comprising Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Divulging detail of the BRICS programme, he said, "Basically, it is a two-day event on October 15 and 16, and normally, the BRICS Summit starts with an informal dinner, which will be held on October 15 in Goa. At that event, we are also trying to bring all the five captains of the participating teams - because there would be also the final of the Under 17 football tournament - to meet the leaders and, perhaps, to have a photo-op with them."

"The main summit day is October 16, which will start with a group photo, and then, a restricted meeting of the five BRICS' leaders, followed by a working luncheon. Thereafter, the leaders will meet the business council and accept the report from them. Besides, there will be for the first time a briefing by New Development Bank (NDB) president K.V. Kamath, because they have completed a year of functioning and they have issued the first loans, so they would be coming and presenting a report," said Secretary (E.R.).

"Later, we will have a plenary, where the Prime Minister will address the media in the presence of all the leaders, and there will be the leaders' statement at the end," he said.

Sinha further said in the evening of October 16, there first would be a BIMSTEC meeting that the Prime Minister would chair, followed by a meeting of BRICS and BIMSTEC leaders.

And the final event would be a BRICS-BIMSTEC outreach dinner, he added.

BRICS brings together five major emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa comprising 43 percent of the world population, 30 percent of the world GDP and 17 percent share in the world trade.

The acronym BRIC was first used in 2001 by Goldman Sachs in their Global Economics Paper, "The World Needs Better Economic BRICs" on the basis of econometric analyses projecting that the economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China would individually and collectively occupy far greater economic space and would be amongst the world's largest economies in the next 50 years or so.

As a formal grouping, BRIC started after the meeting of the Leaders of Russia, India and China in St. Petersburg on the margins of G8 Outreach Summit in 2006. The grouping was formalised during the first meeting of BRIC Foreign Ministers on the margins of UNGA in New York in 2006. The first BRIC Summit was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on June 16, 2009.

It was agreed to expand BRIC into BRICS with the inclusion of South Africa at the BRIC Foreign Ministers' meeting in New York in September 2010. Accordingly, South Africa attended the third BRICS Summit in Sanya, China, on April 14, 2011.