Blitz India Business
NEW DELHI: Eleven economies are comparing digital rulebooks in Pune this week. What India is selling there has no invoice, no HS code and no shipping line — and it may outlast most things that do.
Under India’s BRICS chairship for 2026, the Department of Telecommunications is hosting the BRICS ICT Track at Pune from 17 to 21 August, under the theme “Innovate, Cooperate and Transform (ICT) for a Resilient Future”. The 7th BRICS Working Group for Cooperation in ICTs met from 17 to 19 August; the Digital BRICS Forum and Expo follows on 20 August; and the 12th BRICS Communications Ministers’ Meeting is on 21 August, with Union Minister Jyotiraditya M. Scindia representing India. BRICS now comprises eleven economies: Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.
Read the working group’s priority list and the commercial logic becomes visible. It covers connectivity that is universal, meaningful, affordable, sustainable and resilient; trusted, secure and human-centric digital environments; digital skills and capacity development; and innovation, start-ups and entrepreneurship in ICT, including artificial intelligence, next-generation communications, digital public infrastructure, cybersecurity and child online protection. Digital public infrastructure sits in that list as one item among several. In practice it is the item on which India has the strongest evidence and the least competition.
India at the ministers’ table: Jyotiraditya M. Scindia, Union Minister of Communications and Development of the North Eastern Region, who will represent India at the 12th BRICS Communications Ministers’ Meeting at Pune on 21 August 2026.
A rail contract is won once. A payments rail, an identity layer or a data-exchange standard, once adopted, sets the terms on which every application above it is built — for a decade or more. That is a different kind of export.
At a Glance
• Host: Department of Telecommunications, under India’s BRICS Chairship 2026
• Venue and dates: Pune, 17–21 August 2026
• Theme: ‘Innovate, Cooperate and Transform (ICT) for a Resilient Future’
• 7th ICT Working Group: 17–19 August
• Digital BRICS Forum and Expo: 20 August
• 12th Communications Ministers’ Meeting: 21 August
• India represented by: Union Minister Jyotiraditya M. Scindia
• Membership: eleven economies
The structural argument for treating digital public infrastructure as an export sector rests on how it monetises, which is indirectly and over long horizons. A country that adopts an open identity, payments or data-exchange layer built on Indian design principles does not send India a licence fee. What it creates instead is a market in which Indian systems integrators, fintechs, compliance vendors and cloud operators are already fluent in the architecture, and in which Indian standards bodies have a seat when the next version is specified. The revenue arrives as services exports and enterprise contracts years later, attributed to entirely different line items.
Two features of the Pune agenda make it more than a showcase. The first is that the Focus Group on Digital Public Infrastructure heard presentations from India and other member countries on their national approaches — a comparison of implementations rather than a presentation of one. Interoperability between large systems is negotiated, not declared, and this is what the negotiation looks like at an early stage. The second is child online protection, which appears both in the working group’s priorities and as a thematic panel at the Forum. Across eleven economies with very large young populations coming online through low-cost devices, a shared baseline there has commercial force: platforms build to the strictest common standard and deploy it everywhere.
The risk to be honest about is that soft infrastructure exports are hard to measure, and what cannot be measured tends to be under-resourced. India has no published series for digital public infrastructure adoption abroad comparable to the monthly trade data that tracks a container of steel. Building one — countries adopting each stack, transaction volumes running on it, associated Indian services revenue — would let this be managed as a sector rather than championed as a theme. The chairship year is the moment to start, because the meetings that decide whose architecture becomes the default are happening now, in Pune, and the results will be visible in trade data long after the communiqués are filed.