The Lift Line
Geopolitical parity rests on knowledge before it rests on money or arms.
Why This Editorial Matters for Your Exam
BRICS is a testable topic every year, and its 2026 hosting by India makes it inescapable. This editorial supplies the science and technology angle that most compilations miss, and it does so through two very examinable anchors: the 2020 TRIPS waiver proposal at the WTO, and the INSA-convened BRICS Science Academies Forum of July 2026. Both are dated, sourced and available for direct reproduction in a Mains answer, and both connect the science-policy question to the strategic autonomy question that is the recurring frame of GS Paper 2.
GS Paper 2: Bilateral, regional and global groupings involving India; effect of policies and politics of developed and developing countries on India’s interests. GS Paper 3: Awareness in the fields of IT, space, computers, robotics, nanotechnology, biotechnology; issues relating to intellectual property rights.
| Concept | Meaning | Why it is testable |
|---|---|---|
| TRIPS Agreement, 1995 | WTO agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights | The base against which any waiver proposal is read |
| TRIPS waiver proposal, October 2020 | Joint India-South Africa proposal to temporarily suspend certain TRIPS obligations during COVID-19 | Named, dated, drew 90 plus supporters, blocked by high-income members |
| BRICS Science Academies Forum | Convened by INSA as background to the summit on 22 and 23 July 2026; joint statement endorsed by the national academies of eight members and five partner countries | Its date, host and priority areas are examinable |
| BRICS AI Research and Innovation Network | Proposed shared network with multilingual foundation models, joint pilots and common standards | The specific institutional deliverable arising from the Forum |
| Foundation model | Large model trained on broad data, adaptable to many downstream tasks | The unit of dependency in current AI supply chains |
Background and Context
The author. Shekhar Mande is President of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), the country’s premier learned society of scientists, established in 1935.
The occasion. The 18th BRICS Summit convenes at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, on 12 and 13 September 2026, under India’s chairship, held since 1 January 2026 in succession to Brazil. The theme is “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.”
The scientific track. As background to the summit, earlier in the year, on 22 and 23 July 2026, INSA had convened the BRICS Science Academies Forum. Its joint statement was endorsed by the national academies of eight BRICS members, that is, Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Russia and South Africa, together with partner-country academies from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria and Vietnam.
The prior ceiling. In October 2020, India and South Africa jointly proposed at the WTO that certain TRIPS obligations be temporarily suspended so that vaccines, diagnostics and treatments could be manufactured more widely. The proposal drew support from more than ninety countries and endorsement from BRICS as a bloc, but was withheld by a cluster of high-income members including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, Switzerland, Norway and the EU.
The Analysis
1. The epistemology thesis, in one line. Geopolitical parity rests on knowledge before it rests on money or arms. A licensee accepts the terms of the technology owner; a producer negotiates them. The same relation scales from firms to states to blocs, and it explains why an economically weighty grouping can still be strategically light if its knowledge base sits elsewhere.
2. The demographic and economic base is real, but the scientific base is uneven. BRICS together represent nearly half of humanity and about forty per cent of global GDP at purchasing power parity. Yet member states differ substantially in per capita income, research infrastructure, data governance regimes, regulatory frameworks and intellectual property laws. Excellence in individual members, therefore, does not aggregate automatically into collective strength, and a common architecture has to be built rather than assumed.
3. COVID-19 was the ceiling test of North-South solidarity, and the ceiling held. The India-South Africa TRIPS waiver proposal of October 2020 drew more than ninety supporters and was formally endorsed by BRICS as a bloc, yet a small cluster of high-income members declined. The operational lesson for the grouping is that technological security in a health emergency cannot be outsourced; it must be built inside the bloc before it is needed, not during the crisis.
4. Artificial intelligence intensifies the same logic. AI capability today is concentrated in a small number of countries and firms. A state that merely consumes frontier models inherits not only their training biases but also the technological and regulatory assumptions of their developers. Because BRICS members carry long and diverse intellectual traditions on personhood, the individual and the collective, and the limits of power, the argument runs, their conceptual vocabularies are a distinctive resource for AI governance, not a cost to be translated away.
5. The July 2026 Forum turned the argument into a proposal. The joint statement of the BRICS Science Academies Forum identified five priority areas: advanced materials and manufacturing, healthcare, climate and environmental prediction, agriculture and food security, and disaster management. It proposed a BRICS AI Research and Innovation Network spanning member and partner academies, with the ambition of developing shared standards, conducting joint pilots and building multilingual foundation models trained on data from developing-world contexts rather than translating models developed elsewhere.
6. Workforce transition is the tell of a serious plan. The statement’s insistence on workforce transition and skills development matters because AI adopted without local expertise merely relocates dependency from a foreign model to a foreign services contract. Building compute without building people is a subsidy to the incumbents; building people alongside compute is the point of the exercise.
7. What integration buys, and what it does not. Pooling financial resources, research capacity and scientific talent will not make members immune to techno-nationalist pressure. It will make coercion more costly and less effective by creating alternative sources of knowledge, technology and supply, and it will let the grouping negotiate on terms closer to parity when the rules of emerging technologies are written.
Data and Institutions Vault
Prelims-grade facts:
BRICS weight in one line each:
- Roughly half of humanity.
- About forty per cent of global GDP at purchasing power parity.
- Eleven members after the 2024 expansion and Indonesia’s induction from January 2025.
The TRIPS waiver reference:
- The proposal was jointly moved by India and South Africa at the WTO in October 2020.
- It sought to temporarily suspend certain TRIPS obligations for COVID-19 vaccines, diagnostics and treatments.
- It drew support from more than ninety countries and endorsement from BRICS as a bloc.
- It was withheld by a cluster of high-income members, that is, the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, Switzerland, Norway and the EU.
The BRICS Science Academies Forum:
- Convened as background to the summit by the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) on 22 and 23 July 2026.
- Joint statement endorsed by the national academies of eight BRICS members (Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Russia, South Africa) and partner academies of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria and Vietnam.
- Priority areas: advanced materials and manufacturing, healthcare, climate and environmental prediction, agriculture and food security, disaster management.
- Proposed instrument: BRICS AI Research and Innovation Network with shared standards, joint pilots and multilingual foundation models.
Institutions to name correctly:
- INSA, Indian National Science Academy, established 1935, current President Shekhar Mande.
- WTO TRIPS Agreement, in force since 1995.
- New Development Bank, headquartered in Shanghai, the BRICS development finance institution.
⚠️ Watch the trap: The TRIPS waiver proposal was not adopted; the WTO’s later June 2022 Ministerial Decision was narrower than the original 2020 proposal. Both dates are examinable, and they are constantly conflated.
⚠️ A second trap: “Foundation model” is not synonymous with “large language model”. A foundation model is any large model trained on broad data and adaptable across tasks. Multilingual foundation models trained on Global South data are the specific deliverable proposed at the Forum.
The Debate
FOR (build the common architecture now): The demographic and economic base already exists, the health emergency showed the cost of not having a common architecture, and AI is intensifying that cost every quarter that the bloc stays a consumer. A BRICS AI network with multilingual foundation models addresses a real and rising asymmetry, and its priority areas map onto members’ actual development needs rather than someone else’s frontier.
AGAINST (declarations outrun institutions): Scientific work happens where funding, peer review and talent mobility do, and both still run through Global North institutions. A bloc-level architecture assembled at summits risks becoming a political overlay on collaborations that continue at the country and lab level, and asymmetry between members can convert a shared network into a single dominant node with the others as spokes, that is, the pattern already visible in some existing multi-country platforms.
Balanced verdict: The Forum’s design is right where the summit’s design is often wrong, because it anchors the effort at the level of learned academies and priority areas rather than at the level of joint communiqués. The correct sequencing is low-cost first, that is, multilingual datasets, joint fellowship programmes, common data infrastructure, and shared standards, and then higher-cost items such as shared facilities and joint models. The specific deliverable to defend is that the AI network be multilingual by design and not by translation, because that is where a Global South comparative advantage actually exists.
How to Think About This
For any question about strategic autonomy, run a three-step check. First: who owns the standards in the domain, that is, chemistry, telecom, AI, payments? Second: who owns the intellectual property on which the standards rest? Third: who owns the training data or reference cases that feed the systems, that is, patient records, images, language corpora? Standards and IP are the visible layer of the epistemology of power; data is the quieter one and the harder one to build after the fact. A grouping that builds all three inside its own perimeter negotiates from parity; a grouping that owns only markets negotiates from need. That is the frame the editorial applies to BRICS, and it is portable to any similar question on Mains.
Technological autonomy is a precondition of strategic autonomy. In this light, examine the case for a common scientific and technological architecture within BRICS, and identify the internal asymmetries that stand in its way. (250 words)
Geopolitical parity rests on knowledge before it rests on money or arms. A nation without an autonomous scientific and technological base is obliged to accept whatever terms the owners of technology set, and the same logic scales to blocs.
For BRICS, an enlarged grouping that accounts for roughly half the world’s population and about forty per cent of global GDP in purchasing power parity terms, the question is whether the demographic and economic weight can be converted into a common scientific capacity.
The case is strongest where the cost of dependence is highest. The October 2020 India-South Africa proposal at the WTO to suspend certain TRIPS obligations during the pandemic drew more than ninety supporters and was formally endorsed by BRICS as a bloc, but was blocked by a cluster of high-income members.
The lesson was that international solidarity in a health emergency has a ceiling that patents can reach, and that technological security cannot be outsourced. The same logic now applies with greater force to artificial intelligence, where capability is concentrated in a small number of countries and firms, and where a state that consumes frontier models inherits not only their training biases but also the technological and regulatory assumptions of their developers.
On this reading the BRICS Science Academies Forum, convened by INSA as background to the summit on 22 and 23 July 2026, is a specific institutional move rather than a general aspiration. Its joint statement, endorsed by the national academies of Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Russia and South Africa, together with partner academies from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria and Vietnam, identified five priority areas, that is, advanced materials and manufacturing, healthcare, climate and environmental prediction, agriculture and food security, and disaster management, and proposed a BRICS AI Research and Innovation Network with shared standards, joint pilots and multilingual foundation models trained on Global South data.
The obstacle is real. Members differ in income, research infrastructure, data governance, regulatory regimes and intellectual property law, so a common architecture cannot rest on the assumption of homogeneous capacity, and workforce transition and skills development have to be built alongside compute, or the network merely relocates the dependency.
The transition from an alliance of economic convenience to a functioning scientific partnership does not immunise BRICS against techno-nationalist pressure. It changes the price of that pressure by creating alternative sources of knowledge, technology and supply, and it gives the grouping a seat at the table on which global technology rules are written.
That is the epistemology of power in one line.
Interview Angle
"The 2020 India-South Africa TRIPS waiver drew 90 plus supporters and was blocked by a handful of high-income economies. If the same emergency arrived tomorrow, what part of the BRICS scientific architecture would you already want in place, and what part would still be too politically expensive to build?"
Takeaway Box
- Geopolitical parity rests on knowledge before it rests on money or arms. BRICS has demographic and economic weight, that is, half of humanity and forty per cent of global GDP in PPP terms, but its scientific weight is uneven, and integration must be built rather than assumed.
- The COVID-19 TRIPS waiver proposal of October 2020 was moved by India and South Africa, drew ninety plus supporters and BRICS endorsement, and was blocked by a cluster of high-income members. That is the ceiling test of North-South solidarity in a health emergency.
- INSA’s BRICS Science Academies Forum on 22 and 23 July 2026 proposed a BRICS AI Research and Innovation Network with multilingual foundation models, joint pilots and shared standards across five priority areas.
- A bloc that only consumes AI inherits the biases and assumptions of the model’s developers. A bloc that co-designs models negotiates on the rules under which they are governed.
- Integration will not immunise members against techno-nationalist pressure. It will raise the price of that pressure by creating alternative sources of knowledge, technology and supply.
Sources: The Economic Times, INSA release on the BRICS Science Academies Forum, WTO archive on the 2020 TRIPS waiver proposal.
Shekhar Mande argues that geopolitical parity rests on knowledge before it rests on money or arms, and that the enlarged BRICS, roughly half of humanity and about forty per cent of global GDP measured at purchasing power parity, has both the reason and the raw material to build a common scientific and technological architecture rather than remain a licensee of technologies developed elsewhere.
- The COVID-19 experience is the clearest instance: the October 2020 India-South Africa proposal at the WTO to temporarily suspend certain TRIPS obligations drew support from more than ninety countries and endorsement from the BRICS grouping as a bloc, yet a cluster of high-income members declined to support it, showing where international solidarity ends in a health emergency.
- The BRICS Science Academies Forum, which INSA had convened earlier in the year, on 22 and 23 July 2026, endorsed by the national academies of eight BRICS members and partner-country academies of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria and Vietnam, has proposed a BRICS AI Research and Innovation Network with multilingual foundation models, shared standards and joint pilots, so that member states are contributors to AI design and governance rather than downstream consumers of frontier models.
- BRICS states differ substantially in income, research infrastructure, data governance, regulatory frameworks and intellectual property regimes, so excellence in individual countries does not automatically translate into collective strength, and the design of any common architecture must address this asymmetry rather than assume it away.
A counter-view holds that scientific collaboration follows the incentives of publication, funding and talent mobility, all of which currently run through the same Global North institutions the argument seeks to move beyond, and that a bloc-level architecture assembled by heads of state risks becoming a political declaration whose research funding, peer review and career reward structures continue to sit elsewhere.
Anchor cooperation at the level where scientific work actually happens, that is, learned academies, national labs and universities, rather than only at summits; sequence deliverables from lower-cost items such as shared data infrastructure, multilingual datasets and joint fellowship programmes to higher-cost items such as shared research facilities; and keep the AI network multilingual by design so that model capabilities in Global South languages become a competitive rather than a compensatory feature.
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