India and South Africa's $19 Billion Trade Surge Tests BRICS Unity

Bilateral trade between India and South Africa hit 19.25 billion dollars in 2023-24, up from roughly 11.5 billion dollars three years earlier. More than 150 Indian companies have invested over 10 billion dollars in South Africa, creating more than 18,000 jobs. Those numbers are real. They are also, by most measures, just the start.

The two countries now face a choice within BRICS: deepen that economic relationship into something structural, or allow it to remain largely symbolic. The answer matters not only for trade statistics but for the workers and communities whose livelihoods depend on whether investment translates into lasting industrial capacity.

BRICS itself has changed dramatically since it began as an acronym describing emerging economies in 2006. What the world often sees as a diplomatic spectacle of handshakes and family photographs masks a more substantive reality. Behind the optics, the grouping has been constructing practical mechanisms for trade, development finance, cross-border payments and technology. It now spans members and partners across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, representing roughly half of humanity, about 40 percent of global GDP and more than a quarter of global trade. That is not a headline factory. It is an agenda-setter with genuine economic and political weight.

The real test of BRICS is not whether its members think alike. It is whether countries with divergent interests and strategic anxieties can still build together. Expansion has made agreement harder, not easier, yet member states continue to negotiate common positions through consultation and consensus. That capacity matters increasingly in an international system fractured by real-time crises and competing interests. BRICS cannot resolve every conflict, but it can preserve channels of conversation on terrorism, energy and food security, climate change, supply-chain disruptions and financial instability.

The financial architecture emerging from the bloc shows how practical this agenda has become. Intra-BRICS commerce has grown enormously from the grouping’s early years, crossing the trillion-dollar mark. India alone traded about 226 billion dollars with other BRICS economies in the first half of 2026. The debate around BRICS finance is often reduced to questions about a common currency, but the more immediate and potentially more useful work involves making cross-border payments faster and cheaper, improving interoperability between payment systems and expanding the use of local currencies in trade and financing. The New Development Bank follows the same logic. It does not need to replace the World Bank to matter. It provides developing economies with another source of development finance and an institutional space in which their priorities carry greater weight.

For India and South Africa specifically, the next stage of cooperation points toward integrated value chains rather than simply higher bilateral sales. Economic conversations around the BRICS summit identified critical minerals and beneficiation, green industrialisation, electric-vehicle and battery value chains, infrastructure, agriculture, digital technologies and skills as areas for deeper cooperation. South Africa possesses critical minerals, industrial capabilities and a strategic position within Africa. India brings manufacturing scale, pharmaceuticals, digital capabilities and one of the world’s largest consumer markets. The opportunity lies in processing minerals together, manufacturing components, expanding pharmaceutical production, developing clean-energy technologies and linking Indian investment to African industrialisation.

Meanwhile, the African Continental Free Trade Area amplifies this possibility. South Africa could become an important gateway for Indian investment into African production networks, while India connects South African businesses more deeply with Asian markets. That is a concrete outcome, not a diplomatic aspiration.

BRICS is sometimes portrayed as an attempt to replace the West, a characterisation that misses its more interesting purpose. Developing countries do not necessarily want to exchange one centre of power for another. They want greater room to manoeuvre in an increasingly fragmented world. Countries from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East that have too often been recipients of global rules now have a larger role in conversations about making them. The Global South does not need another table at which it is invited to listen. It needs tables at which it helps write the agenda.

For South Africa and India, this shift has particular resonance. Both have consistently argued that multilateralism cannot remain credible when institutions claiming to represent the world inadequately reflect its demographic and economic realities. BRICS should therefore resist becoming obsessed with proving it is larger than the G7 or capable of replacing institutions created after the Second World War. Its relevance does not depend on defeating another bloc.

Twenty years ago, BRICS was an interesting acronym. It then became a summit. Today it is becoming an institution with economic weight and diplomatic consequence. The harder question, still unanswered, is whether shared voice can be turned into shared power, and whether shared power can produce outcomes that ordinary people can actually see.