India's BRICS trade has doubled in five years

And two countries account for most of it

India's trade with the BRICS bloc rose from USD 203 billion in 2020-21 to USD 417 billion in 2025-26, according to The Rise of BRICS Nations, a report published in June by the ASSOCHAM Global Research and Strategy Centre using Ministry of Commerce and Industry data. That is an increase of about 105 percent in five years.

The composition is where the report is quieter. India's exports to BRICS partners stood at USD 95.8 billion in 2025-26, against imports of USD 321.8 billion, leaving a trade deficit with the bloc of USD 226 billion. Over the same five years exports grew 49 percent while imports grew 132 percent. Trade has doubled, and the larger part of the increase came in on the import side.

The bloc figure also conceals how few countries it involves. China and the UAE together account for 60 percent of India's BRICS trade. China alone runs a deficit of USD 112 billion and Russia USD 51 billion, which between them is 72 percent of the total. India records a surplus with only three of the ten partners covered, Egypt, Iran and Ethiopia, whose combined trade with India comes to under USD 9 billion.

On the export side the concentration is sharper still. The UAE takes USD 37.4 billion, or 39 percent of everything India sends to the bloc, and the report notes it is the only BRICS member with which India has signed a free trade agreement in recent years. Trade with the UAE has risen from USD 43 billion in 2020-21 to USD 101 billion. The report also records that exports to China, Indonesia, Iran and Ethiopia have declined since the start of the decade.

ASSOCHAM's proposal is that Indian exports to BRICS can reach USD 200 billion by 2030, by raising India's share of those countries' global imports to 4 percent. India's current share is below 3 percent across the bloc and below 1 percent of China's imports. Reaching USD 200 billion from USD 95.8 billion in four years requires compound growth of about 20 percent a year, against the 8.3 percent compounded that exports to the bloc have actually managed over the past five.

The report sizes the opportunity at USD 698 billion, being the global imports of BRICS members in India's top 25 export product lines. That figure is assembled from different years for different countries: 2025 data for Brazil, China, Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, 2024 for the UAE, 2023 for Iran and Ethiopia, and 2021 for Russia. It is not a single-year number, and the Russian component predates the import surge that reshaped the relationship.

Where India already sells well into the bloc is narrow and mostly established: articles of jewellery, where BRICS takes 44.7 percent of India's global exports, frozen bovine meat at 39.7 percent, passenger vehicles at 37 percent and agrochemicals at 33 percent. Turbojets and gas turbines sit at the other end, at 4 percent.

Nirmal K. Minda, ASSOCHAM's president, said recent initiatives on trade and cross-border investment under the BRICS framework should act as a catalyst across high-growth sectors.

One structural point sits against that. The report states plainly, in its own section on the subject, that BRICS has no comprehensive trade agreement offering preferential market access across the bloc, and that cooperation so far rests on what it calls soft initiatives. The single largest destination for India's BRICS exports is the one country where a bilateral agreement already exists.

The report does not state what export growth rate the USD 200 billion target assumes, or how the increase is to be distributed across a bloc where four of ten partners have taken less from India than they did five years ago.