India’s BRICS Challenge: Can It Move From Technology Buyer to Technology Powerhouse?

By Kalpana Singhal

India’s widening trade imbalance with BRICS economies is not merely a story about imports and exports. Beneath the numbers lies a deeper technology challenge — whether India can capture more value from semiconductors, electronics, AI infrastructure and next-generation digital networks instead of remaining heavily dependent on overseas technology supply chains.
As India prepares to host the BRICS Leaders’ Summit in New Delhi on September 12-13, the grouping’s growing economic influence is being accompanied by a less comfortable reality for New Delhi: India’s trade with its BRICS partners has expanded rapidly, but imports have grown far faster than exports. In FY2025-26, India imported around $321.8 billion worth of merchandise from BRICS economies while exporting about $95.7 billion, resulting in a deficit of approximately $226.1 billion. BRICS partners accounted for close to 42% of India’s merchandise imports but only about 22% of its exports.

For technology leaders, however, the composition of that trade may matter even more than its headline size.
The technology inside India’s trade deficit

China remains at the centre of India’s BRICS trade imbalance. Official Indian data shows that India’s imports from China climbed to $131.63 billion in FY2025-26, compared with exports of $19.47 billion, leaving a bilateral deficit of more than $112 billion. A significant share of the products flowing from China into India sits directly inside modern technology and manufacturing supply chains. They include machinery, electronics, computers, integrated circuits, telecommunications equipment components and lithium-ion products.
That makes the imbalance different from a conventional consumer-goods trade story.

Many of these imports are inputs required to build India’s own rapidly expanding electronics, telecom, automotive, energy and digital infrastructure industries. The Indian government has itself noted that several Chinese imports are intermediate and capital goods used by growing domestic industries and, in some cases, in products subsequently exported from India.
The challenge therefore is not simply to reduce imports. It is to determine how much of the technology value chain India can bring home.

Semiconductors remain a critical pressure point

Semiconductors illustrate the problem particularly clearly.

NITI Aayog has noted that India has historically imported roughly 90-95% of its semiconductor and electronic component requirements, with China, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore among the major supply sources. India is now attracting investment in semiconductor assembly, testing, packaging and component manufacturing, but building a mature domestic ecosystem will take time.
This creates an important distinction for India’s technology strategy.

India has become a major market for smartphones, cloud services, data centres, enterprise technology and artificial intelligence. But becoming one of the world’s largest technology consumers does not automatically translate into control over the underlying technology stack.
The bigger opportunity is to move further upstream — into chips, electronic components, telecom equipment, advanced manufacturing systems, intellectual property and increasingly the compute infrastructure needed for AI.

BRICS itself is becoming increasingly digital

Interestingly, technology is simultaneously moving towards the centre of the BRICS agenda.
Under India’s 2026 BRICS presidency, member countries have been discussing artificial intelligence, Digital Public Infrastructure, cybersecurity, future communication networks, digital governance and resilient telecom infrastructure. India’s Department of Telecommunications has also advanced work involving the BRICS Institute of Future Networks, Digital BRICS Task Force and cooperation around DPI.

In August, BRICS discussions in Pune included proposals around a BRICS Digital Public Infrastructure Repository, pilot DPI projects and cooperation on digital ecosystems and submarine cable infrastructure.
The wider grouping has also been developing principles around AI governance. BRICS leaders have argued for stronger participation by emerging economies in AI development while emphasising technological autonomy, domestic digital capacity, data governance and infrastructure.

This creates a potentially important opening for India.

Rather than viewing BRICS only as another market for physical trade, New Delhi could increasingly treat the grouping as a platform for exporting digital architecture, enterprise technology, fintech systems, cybersecurity expertise, software, AI applications and technology services.

From UPI-style platforms to AI and future networks

India already possesses a different kind of technology advantage from some of its BRICS partners: population-scale digital platforms.
Its experience in digital payments and public digital infrastructure has attracted international attention, and India is now proposing deeper BRICS cooperation around DPI and digital governance. The discussions provide a pathway through which India’s technology exports could increasingly include not just software development services, but platforms, architecture, standards, implementation expertise and intellectual property.

Payments could become another test case.

India is pushing for greater interoperability between BRICS members’ central bank digital currency systems to make cross-border transactions faster and potentially less costly, although significant technical and geopolitical challenges remain. If implemented carefully, such initiatives could eventually create a different category of intra-BRICS commerce — one built around digital rails rather than only commodities and manufactured goods.

The opportunity for Indian technology companies

For Indian CIOs, technology vendors and startup founders, the debate therefore goes beyond trade policy. BRICS represents a vast potential market for enterprise SaaS, fintech, cybersecurity, digital identity, telecom platforms, cloud technologies, AI applications and industrial digitalisation. But capturing that opportunity will require Indian companies to build more proprietary products and intellectual property rather than relying predominantly on the country’s traditional strength in IT services. It will also require deeper integration between India’s manufacturing and software capabilities. An AI economy ultimately depends on chips, servers, networking, storage, energy infrastructure and data centres. Digital sovereignty therefore cannot be achieved through software alone.

The real BRICS technology test

India does not necessarily need to manufacture every component it currently imports. Modern technology supply chains are global by design. The more important objective is to ensure that India captures a progressively larger share of their high-value layers — research, design, intellectual property, platforms, advanced manufacturing and digital services.

That is why India’s BRICS trade deficit should also be viewed as a technology competitiveness indicator. BRICS can give India access to enormous markets, investment and technology collaboration. But the long-term measure of success will not simply be whether intra-BRICS trade continues to grow. It will be whether India evolves from being one of the bloc’s largest technology customers into one of its most important technology creators.

For India’s technology industry, that may be the far more consequential BRICS story.