Prime Minister Narendra Modi will attend the 12th BRICS summit on Tuesday, which will take place largely due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The summit will bring together Prime Minister Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping for the second time in seven days amid the ongoing Indochina clash in Ladakh, following last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit. .
Read also | BRICS Summit: Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping will share platform again
The twelfth BRICS summit is being held on the theme “Global Stability, Shared Security and Innovative Growth”.
This is everything you need to know about the 5-member bloc ‘BRICS’
1. The acronym ‘BRICS’ stands for the five member states of the bloc: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Initially, the group was only called ‘BRIC’ as South Africa was not among its original members and only joined in December 2010 at the invitation of China. Therefore, the group’s name was changed to “BRICS”.
2. Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs is credited with coining the term “BRIC” in his 2001 publication titled “Building Better Global Economic BRICs.” Neill coined this term to indicate the emerging powers that he believed would be, along with the United States, the five largest economies in the world in the 21st century.
3. In 2006, the Foreign Ministers of the original four member states met in New York City on the sidelines of the General Debate of the United Nations Assembly. Subsequently, in 2009, Russia’s Yekaterinburg hosted a large-scale diplomatic meeting of the group.
4. The Russian city also hosted the first official BRIC summit on June 16, 2009. Lula da Silva (then President of Brazil), Dmitry Medvedev (then President of Russia), Manmohan Singh (then Prime Minister of India) and Hu Jintao (then-Chinese President) were the participants of the first BRIC summit.
5. Since then, a total of ten BRICS summits have been held. These were carried out in Brazil (2010), China (2011), India (2012), South Africa (2013), Brazil (2014), Russia (2015), India (2016), China (2017), South Africa (2018) . and Brazil (2019).
6. South Africa’s first summit as a full member was held in 2011 in Sanya, China. The current summit is the first BRICS summit to be held virtually, although Russia retains its host nation status. Meanwhile, India is scheduled to host its third BRICS summit, the group’s thirteenth, in 2021.
7. Of the five member states, four are among the 10 most populous countries in the world: China (1), India (2), Brazil (6) and Russia (9). Meanwhile, South Africa is the 24th most populous country in the world.
8. In terms of area, once again, four are in the top 10: Russia (1), China (3), Brazil (5) and India (7). Here too South Africa reaches 24.
9. BRICS has a total of five official languages: Portuguese (Brazil), Russian (Russia), Hindi (India), Mandarin (China) and English (South Africa). The group is based in Shanghai, China.
10. The group also comprises two financial institutions: the New Development Bank (NDB; also called BRICS Development Bank) and the Contingent Reserve Agreement (CRA). Both were created at the VI Summit in 2014, held in Fortaleza, Brazil, and were activated in 2015.
.
