India holds barely 1% of the world's vehicles but suffers around 11% of global road traffic deaths, and the editorial argues that fixing this needs a systemic "Safe System" approach, not court orders alone.

• Enforcement gap: chronic shortages in traffic police cadres limit real policing of seat-belt and helmet compliance.
• Engineering gap: manufacturers could be required to fit tamper-proof seat-belt reminders that resist post-purchase modification.
• The "Safe System" approach — used internationally — designs roads assuming human error is inevitable: fixing accident black spots, separating two-wheeler traffic from vulnerable users, and ensuring timely trauma care, rather than relying only on individual compliance.
• Judicial restraint: the Court referring the matter to the Centre (rather than issuing directions itself, as in 2019) is read as an implicit acknowledgment that road safety has "outgrown judicial fiat" and needs an executive, systemic response.

Hosting the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi tests India's diplomatic skill, as a larger, more divided bloc gathers amid live conflicts involving several of its own members and pressure from the United States.

• Internal divisions: the Iran–Israel conflict, and Iran's retaliatory strike on the UAE, puts two BRICS members at odds and makes a common bloc narrative difficult.
• India's own position on Israel has diverged from the bloc's traditionally more critical line, adding friction to consensus-building.
• U.S. pressure: President Trump has accused BRICS of plotting against dollar dominance and threatened tariffs over intra-BRICS trade in local currencies — a risk for India as it separately tries to repair trade ties with Washington.

• Successfully reconciling these divergent interests into a joint statement would be a genuine diplomatic win, given BRICS's growing economic weight as a counter-pole to the G-7.
• India's BRICS presidency, alongside its 2023 G20 presidency, reinforces its claim to a larger voice in global governance — a recurring theme of Indian foreign policy.

A critical assessment argues that BRICS's flagship financial institutions — the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement — remain structurally dependent on the dollar-based system they were meant to challenge.

• Currency composition: about half of NDB's outstanding bonds are dollar-denominated, with most of the rest in Chinese yuan; the South African rand accounts for just 1%. Local-currency lending stood at roughly 22% in mid-2025, short of the bank's own 30% target.
• Credit-rating dependence: the NDB seeks ratings from S&P, Fitch and Moody's — the same western agencies BRICS governments criticise — and in March 2022 froze Russia-linked operations to protect its own credit standing after the Ukraine invasion.
• Scale gap: NDB's cumulative project approvals reached about $39 billion by end-2024, versus the World Bank Group's roughly $100 billion committed annually — and NDB projects are often co-financed with the World Bank/IMF rather than positioned as a rival to them.
• CRA never activated: in a decade, no member has drawn on the CRA; any draw above 30% of a country's quota requires a prior IMF programme, tying the "alternative" safety net back to the institution it was meant to bypass.
• De-dollarisation rhetoric vs record: the 126-point Rio Declaration (2025) does not use the term "de-dollarisation"; India opposes a common BRICS currency over fears of U.S. tariff retaliation, and successive BRICS declarations (Kazan 2024, Rio 2025) ask only for a bigger voting share in a "quota-based, adequately resourced" IMF — not its replacement.

The piece argues BRICS members have not built an alternative financial architecture but a set of institutions operating within the existing dollar- and IMF-centred order — suggesting the underlying goal may be a bigger seat at the current table rather than a new one.

A former Indian diplomat argues that regardless of the summit-level outcome on geopolitical issues, India's BRICS presidency has already delivered substantive cooperation across resilience, innovation and sustainability.

• Resilience: BRICS Digital Centre of Excellence for Smart Grids and Energy Storage; BRICS Logistics Supply Chain Cooperation Framework; Centres of Excellence on Agro-Ecology and Regenerative Agriculture.
• Innovation: proposals for a start-up innovation fund, an incubator network, a digital public infrastructure repository, and a science/research repository.
• Cooperation: revitalising the multilateral trading system, a BRICS urbanisation forum, digital capacity-building for women, and a BRICS MSME Cooperation Portal.
• Sustainability: continuing Brazil's 2025 sustainability focus, with cooperation on desertification, disaster/forest-fire management guidelines, sustainable aviation fuels, and community-based climate adaptation.

• BRICS is now "too big to ignore or fail," given its combined PPP output exceeds the G-7's, so its relevance no longer depends solely on summit-level unity on geopolitics.
• India's objective is to use BRICS to expand its own strategic options and push toward a multipolar world order — a consistent thread in India's foreign policy across multilateral forums.
• Caution: BRICS should avoid being drawn into geopolitical currents (such as the U.S.–Iran or Russia–Ukraine fault lines) that offer it no strategic value and could fracture its practical cooperation agenda.