India’s contribution to BRICS: Nari Shakti moves from promise to delivery

INDIA assumed the BRICS Chairship on 1 January 2026 under the theme ‘‘Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.’’ On the women’s track, our contribution is a specific one.

- ANNPURNA DEVI

We are not bringing merely a slogan or a gallery of success stories to admire. We are bringing a working architecture, one that has reached hundreds of millions of women, and one that does not end with India but begins there, ready to be built upon wherever it travels.

That distinction is the point. For more than a decade, under the leadership of Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, India has pursued women-led development as a national mission, on a scale few countries can match. During our G20 Presidency in 2023, India helped shift the global vocabulary from ‘‘women’s development’’ to ‘‘women-led development,’’ not a change of phrase but a change of premise, from treating women as beneficiaries to treating them as decision-makers. The question we bring to Kochi is the one that follows that shift: once the promise is made, how do you deliver it, at scale, to the last woman in the last village? India has spent ten years answering that in practice rather than merely in principle.

This disposition is not new to Bharat; it is old. Long before the language of development, our Sanskriti envisioned the feminine as the very source of power, knowledge, and prosperity, the three faculties on which any society rises, revered as the Goddesses Durga, Saraswati, and Lakshmi. Divine power itself is named Shakti, and an oft-quoted Sanskrit verse holds that where women are honoured, the Gods themselves rejoice. Nor was this veneration only symbolic: women seers such as Lopamudra and Ghosha composed hymns of the Rig Veda, and philosophers such as Gargi and Maitreyi held their own in the great debates of the Upanishads. For Bharat, then, women-led development is not a borrowed idea but the contemporary form of an ancient one.