When union minister Pralhad Joshi announced the signing of a long-pending memorandum of understanding at the fifth BRICS National Standardisation Bodies meeting in Bengaluru, the official rhetoric followed a predictable script. The agreement was framed as a historic win-win for all eleven member states, a cooperative breakthrough to ease trade and harmonize quality controls across an expanded bloc representing nearly half the world’s population. Trade diplomacy rarely welcomes skepticism. Yet behind the celebratory handshakes in southern India lies a bruising geopolitical battle over the hidden machinery of global commerce, where the ultimate prize is not cooperation, but the power to dictate technical rules for the next generation of industrial technology.
Technical standards are the invisible code governing modern society. They dictate how a microchip communicates, how an electric vehicle battery charges, and how data flows across borders. Historically, the West wrote these rules through institutions based in Europe and the United States. Now, an expanded BRICS bloc—incorporating heavyweights like China and India alongside newer members like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia—is attempting to mount a coordinated challenge to this institutional monopoly.
The sudden finalization of this standardisation framework is not merely a bureaucratic triumph. It represents a calculated attempt to construct a parallel economic infrastructure. For India, the stakes are extraordinarily delicate. New Delhi must balance its domestic manufacturing ambitions against the systemic risk of getting caught in a regulatory orbit dominated by Beijing.
The High Stakes Warfare of Technical Specifications
To understand why a seemingly dry meeting about industrial benchmarks matters, one must look at how international trade actually functions. Tariffs are visible, blunt instruments of statecraft. Technical regulations are subtle, weaponized paperwork. If a country can enshrine its domestic industrial specifications into an international framework, its domestic firms gain an immediate, structural advantage over foreign competitors. Foreign factories must retool their entire assembly lines to comply. That process costs millions.
The standardisation framework signed in Bengaluru aims to create a formal mechanism for eleven disparate economies to coordinate their technical rulebooks. The collective numbers are formidable. The expanded BRICS alliance commands roughly 40 percent of global gross domestic product and more than a quarter of all global merchandise trade. When a bloc of this magnitude speaks with a unified voice in international standard-setting bodies, the traditional Western gatekeepers are forced to listen.
This is about defensive economic autonomy. For years, emerging economies have complained that Western-dominated bodies like the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission set benchmarks that favor advanced Western corporations. These benchmarks often act as non-tariff barriers, keeping goods from developing nations out of lucrative European and American markets. By forming a unified front, the BRICS nations believe they can push back against these regulatory walls.
The strategy sounds flawless on paper. In practice, the internal friction within the bloc threatens to crack the foundation before the first common rules are even drafted. The interests of a manufacturing giant like China do not naturally align with those of an energy exporter like Saudi Arabia or a consumption-driven economy like India.
The Indian Balancing Act and the Shadow of Beijing
India’s position in these negotiations reveals a profound structural tension. During his address at the summit, Joshi noted that India has expanded its domestic standards ecosystem to more than 23,300 benchmarks, with plans to reach 25,000 in short order. He explicitly boasted that nearly 98 percent of these Indian standards are aligned with global benchmarks. That statistic is telling.
It reveals that while India sits at the BRICS table, its economic machinery remains deeply integrated with the traditional global trade architecture.
Indian Standards Integration Profile:
Total Active Standards: ~23,300 (Targeting 25,000)
Global Alignment Level: 98%
Core Focus Sectors: Electronics, Semiconductors, Solar, Clean Energy
This high level of alignment with global rules serves a specific purpose for New Delhi. India is aggressively pitching itself as the ultimate alternative to China for multinational corporations seeking to diversify their supply chains. Programs like the Zero Defect, Zero Effect manufacturing initiative are explicitly designed to elevate Indian factory outputs to the exacting quality levels demanded by Western markets.
If India shifts its regulatory apparatus too far toward a unique BRICS framework, it risks decoupling from the very Western markets it seeks to supply. The danger is not symmetrical. China already possesses a massive, deeply entrenched head start in setting standards for critical future technologies. Through its state-directed China Standards 2035 blueprint, Beijing has spent years systematically placing Chinese officials in leadership positions within global regulatory bodies. It has also exported its domestic technical specifications to developing nations through infrastructure loans.
For India, a common BRICS framework could easily transform into a Trojan horse for Chinese industrial hegemony. If the bloc establishes regional standards for things like electric vehicle components or telecommunications equipment, those standards will almost certainly be derived from Chinese patents. Indian manufacturers would find themselves paying licensing fees to their primary geopolitical rival just to trade within their own economic bloc.
The Dangerous Battleground of Artificial Intelligence Benchmarks
Nowhere is this regulatory tug-of-war more urgent than in the field of artificial intelligence. The Bengaluru summit dedicated significant energy to establishing technical rules for AI systems, with the Bureau of Indian Standards presenting a model focused on safety, transparency, and interoperability.
This is not a theoretical debate about software engineering. The nation that establishes the baseline technical rules for AI verification, data training compliance, and algorithmic risk management will effectively control the global deployment of commercial software.
A critical distinction exists between high-level legal regulations and granular technical standards. Legal frameworks dictate what an AI system is permitted to do under corporate or civil law. Technical standards specify the exact math, testing protocols, and metadata architectures required to prove a system meets those legal obligations. If the BRICS nations codify a unified protocol for AI testing, they can insulate their domestic tech sectors from Western compliance demands.
However, the definition of safe and ethical AI varies wildly across the eleven member states. India’s approach emphasizes democratic transparency, consumer protection, and the mitigation of algorithmic bias within an open internet framework. China’s approach is fundamentally tied to state security, data sovereignty, and strict algorithmic control over information flows. Russia, operating under severe Western sanctions, views technology standards primarily through the lens of import substitution and regime survival.
Attempting to build a bridge across these ideological chasms is an extraordinary gamble. A consensus-based approach sounds democratic, but in the fast-moving tech sector, consensus usually favors the country with the largest engineering army and the most aggressive state backing. India risks spending years negotiating compromises with its BRICS partners while the rest of the world standardizes around Western or purely Chinese protocols.
The Reality of Fractured Supply Chains
The push for standardisation occurs against a broader backdrop of global economic fragmentation. The era of a single, unified global market is drawing to a close, replaced by a messy system of regional trade blocs and bilateral agreements. The expansion of BRICS to eleven nations is a direct symptom of this shift.
For middle-tier economies within the bloc, the promise of a common framework is highly seductive. Countries like Egypt, Ethiopia, and Iran face persistent foreign exchange shortages and trade imbalances. A simplified regulatory highway that allows them to import machinery or electronics from India or China without navigating complex Western compliance audits could provide immediate economic relief.
The structural flaw in this vision is that standardisation does not create market demand. An Ethiopian factory might find it easier to certify its agricultural exports under a new BRICS protocol, but if its primary wealthy consumer bases remain in Europe, the BRICS certificate is functionally useless. The true value of a standard lies entirely in its enforcement power at the point of sale.
Furthermore, the expansion of the bloc complicates the negotiation process exponentially. Reaching a consensus among five nations was difficult. Reaching a consensus among eleven nations, each possessing distinct legal systems, industrial capabilities, and foreign policy alignments, is a diplomatic nightmare. The long delay in signing this specific MoU—which took years of continuous persuasion by Indian bureaucrats—is proof of how stubborn these structural divisions remain.
The True Cost of Regulatory Divergence
For the global corporate executive, the outcomes of the Bengaluru meeting introduce a fresh layer of operational complexity. Companies can no longer assume that a product designed to meet international standards will enjoy unhindered access to emerging markets. The emergence of a distinct BRICS standardisation track creates a high risk of regulatory bifurcation.
Imagine a hypothetical multinational manufacturer producing medical diagnostics equipment. Under the old system, the company designed its core platform to satisfy American FDA and European CE mark standards, knowing those certificates would be widely respected across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the emerging regulatory environment, that same company may soon face a choice. It can either maintain two entirely separate engineering teams to build two distinct product variants, or it must abandon certain markets altogether because the cost of double compliance obliterates its profit margins.
This friction will be particularly intense in the renewable energy sector. Pralhad Joshi, who also oversees India’s ministry of new and renewable energy, has championed the domestic production of solar modules and green hydrogen infrastructure. These are capital-intensive industries where manufacturing scale determines survival. If India uses its domestic Quality Control Orders to enforce unique standards that block cheap Chinese imports, it protects its domestic industry but raises the cost of its own green transition. If it opens up to a shared BRICS standard, it risks seeing its domestic market flooded by subsidized Chinese components that perfectly meet the new shared criteria.
The narrative of a win-win framework is an effective diplomatic tool for public consumption, but it obscures the unforgiving arithmetic of industrial competition. In the international arena, standardisation is a game of dominance where the metrics of success are calculated in market share, patent royalties, and regulatory leverage. India’s chairship of the BRICS meeting has successfully demonstrated its growing diplomatic weight and its ability to forge consensus among highly volatile partners.
The real test, however, will not be measured by the smooth finalization of a text in a Bengaluru conference hall. It will be measured in the coming years by whether Indian industry can maintain its vital access to Western consumers while simultaneously resisting the gravitational pull of a technical ecosystem designed and directed by its most formidable economic neighbor. New Delhi has successfully asserted its place at the head of the negotiating table, but it must now ensure it does not end up on the menu.
