The 2026 BRICS Summit in New Delhi may be remembered for more than debates over de-dollarization, geopolitical rivalry, and the growing weight of the Global South. Its declaration also carried a quieter idea about how a multipolar digital economy might work: sovereign systems should remain nationally controlled while becoming increasingly interoperable.
The New Delhi Declaration placed sovereign digital ecosystems, interoperable Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), and artificial intelligence inside BRICS’ broader development agenda. It also welcomed work on a BRICS DPI repository and pilot projects while recognizing the Digital BRICS Forum and the Focus Group on Digital Public Infrastructure.
BRICS may not need a single digital stack. It may need sovereign stacks that can talk to one another.
That proposition creates what might be called an export paradox. India’s digital philosophy may travel furthest when partner countries adopt its principles while building or retaining technologies of their own.
Stay ahead of the geopolitical week.
MD Briefing delivers expert analysis across five global fronts — the Indo-Pacific, energy, geoeconomics, European security, and the Middle East — every Monday morning. Free.
The idea matters because technological diffusion increasingly carries geopolitical consequences. AI models, cloud platforms, telecommunications equipment, payment rails, and data architectures create economic value as they spread. They also establish standards, switching costs, and institutional dependencies that can gradually narrow a country’s room for maneuver.
For emerging markets, the challenge is to absorb foreign technology while preserving enough freedom to combine suppliers, change course, and negotiate from a position of choice.
From India Stack to a BRICS Proposition
India’s Digital Public Infrastructure is commonly associated with Aadhaar, the Unified Payments Interface, DigiLocker and consent-based data-sharing systems. Their broader strategic significance lies in the architecture behind them: critical digital rails can remain nationally governed while governments and private firms build services on top.
India has increasingly carried this principle into its diplomacy. The government says it has signed India Stack and DPI cooperation agreements with 24 countries, covering digital identity, payments, data exchange, and public-service delivery. Its own description is revealing: the objective is cooperation on architecture and design principles rather than simply exporting finished products.
India first gave DPI broad multilateral visibility through its 2023 G20 presidency, when Digital Public Infrastructure became a priority of the Digital Economy Working Group and was recognized as a development accelerator in the New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration. The Indian government’s 2026 overview of its global DPI partnerships explicitly connects that G20 push with its expanding bilateral cooperation.
BRICS provides a different opportunity. The grouping brings together economies seeking greater influence for the Global South while differing sharply in political systems, currencies, technological capabilities, and relationships with Washington and Beijing.
That heterogeneity makes deep harmonization difficult. A common digital regulator, shared identity infrastructure, or single technology stack would demand levels of political trust BRICS does not possess. Interoperability sets a lower threshold. National systems can remain distinct while common standards and interfaces allow them to communicate.
Payments provide the clearest illustration, but the logic goes further. National payment rails can connect without being replaced. Digital credentials can potentially become verifiable across jurisdictions. Trusted data can move through agreed governance arrangements without creating one supranational database.
The proposition is coordination while preserving national control.
From Indian Hedging to Global South Agency
This architecture fits India’s geopolitical position unusually well.
China remains simultaneously a neighbor, major economic partner, strategic competitor, and fellow BRICS member. Relations have improved since the 2020 border confrontation, yet military deployments, territorial disputes, and strategic mistrust continue to constrain deeper ties. Reuters has described the relationship as a cautious thaw still shaped by unresolved security and economic concerns.
India has, meanwhile, deepened technology and security cooperation with the United States while preserving its longstanding preference for strategic autonomy.
An interoperable digital architecture complements that balancing instinct. India can retain control over critical national systems, work across competing technology ecosystems, and maintain alternatives as geopolitical conditions change. In that sense, its digital policy gives an infrastructural expression to strategic autonomy.
The same logic may be even more relevant to emerging economies with fewer technological resources.
Most Global South countries will continue to depend on foreign cloud providers, semiconductors, AI models, telecom equipment, or industrial technologies. One economy may simultaneously use American cloud services, Chinese hardware, Japanese or Korean industrial systems, Indian-inspired DPI, European regulatory standards, and locally developed applications.
This is a multiplex digital ecosystem: technologies, vendors, standards, and state-backed systems from several origins operating inside the same national economy. The difficult part is managing that complexity.
Technology suppliers bring more than products. They bring standards, financing arrangements, supply chains, data architectures, and strategic relationships. A larger number of vendors can still produce fragmented dependence if governments lack the institutional capacity to manage them.
This makes orchestration capacity critical: deciding which suppliers operate at which layers, what data remains nationally controlled, where redundancy is necessary, which interfaces stay open, and when concentration around one ecosystem starts to weaken bargaining power.
Interoperability creates options. Orchestration determines whether those options translate into agency.
The same question is becoming more consequential as AI diffuses. Emerging markets will probably combine foreign chips, models, cloud services, and enterprise applications. Such dependence can remain manageable when states preserve alternatives. It becomes harder to unwind when several critical layers converge around the same ecosystem.
If technology diffusion generates geopolitical leverage for producer countries, interoperability gives recipient countries one mechanism for preserving negotiating space.
The Export Paradox—and Protocol Power
Indonesia already offers a concrete example. QRIS remains a nationally governed Indonesian payment rail, yet Bank Indonesia has steadily expanded its connectivity abroad. The official QRIS Cross-Border network now covers Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and China.
It also reflects a deliberate policy. Under the Indonesia Payment Systems Blueprint 2030, “International” is one of five core initiatives, with Bank Indonesia seeking wider cross-border payment connectivity while safeguarding national interests.
India could become another connection. In July 2026, Indian Ambassador Sandeep Chakravorty said technical work on QRIS–UPI interoperability was already at an advanced stage, with India hoping integration could be completed by the end of the year. The technical discussions are taking place between payment-system operators in Indonesia and their Indian counterparts.
If completed, QRIS would remain Indonesian and UPI would remain Indian. The value would sit in the interface between them. That is the export paradox in practice. India’s philosophy can gain influence without requiring Indonesia to abandon its own rail.
Bangladesh demonstrates the harder side of the same argument. Its Binimoy interoperable payment platform was designed to connect banks, mobile financial services, and payment providers, but Bangladesh Bank scrapped it in August 2025, citing irregularities and breach of contract.
The institutional weakness went deeper. A later assessment of Binimoy’s failure highlighted inadequate stakeholder engagement, including insufficient involvement of Bangladesh Bank during development. Major mobile-money providers were also not fully integrated.
Binimoy’s difficulties were therefore not simply technical. They exposed an orchestration problem: an interoperable architecture cannot function effectively without alignment among the central bank, banks, mobile-money providers, and other actors expected to participate in it.
Yet Bangladesh did not abandon interoperability.
In November 2025, Bangladesh Bank moved toward an Inclusive Instant Payment System based on Mojaloop. Mojaloop originated from an initiative backed by the Gates Foundation and was designed as an open-source architecture for connecting banks, mobile financial services, and other providers. Its stewardship now sits with the independent Mojaloop Foundation.
That distinction matters. Bangladesh did not escape foreign technological influence by moving away from Binimoy. It changed the terms on which external technology entered its payment infrastructure.
The open-source model gives domestic institutions greater scope for local ownership, customization, and control than a proprietary foreign platform would. Bangladesh Bank itself has framed the new approach around reducing dependence on foreign proprietary technology while retaining the ability to tailor the infrastructure to domestic needs.
Indonesia and Bangladesh therefore illustrate two sides of the same proposition—and expose where geopolitical influence can migrate. Indonesia shows what sovereign interoperability can look like when orchestration works across several foreign systems. Bangladesh shows how states may redesign the architecture when the original institutional arrangement fails, while still drawing on technologies and standards developed elsewhere.
Interoperability still requires rules for switching, authentication, settlement, cybersecurity, and certification. The QRIS–UPI process is being negotiated between operators from both countries. Mojaloop, despite being open-source, still carries design choices, governance practices, and an institutional ecosystem that originated outside Bangladesh.
This is where Protocol Power becomes relevant: influence can sit with the actors able to shape the interfaces, standards, and technical arrangements through which sovereign systems connect.
A country does not need to own another country’s infrastructure to exercise such influence. Technical assistance, standards, institutional design, open-source communities, capacity-building, and convening power can all shape the choices available to governments.
For India, this opens a different route to strategic weight. Its influence may come from helping sovereign systems connect rather than convincing partners to replicate India Stack wholesale.
But open interfaces cannot erase China’s industrial scale or the reach of American technology companies. Weak procurement, cybersecurity gaps, and inadequate data governance can turn multi-vendor strategies into fragmented vulnerability. Public digital infrastructure can also increase surveillance capacity where institutional safeguards remain weak.
AI Raises the Stakes
The New Delhi Declaration brings this debate directly into the AI economy. BRICS leaders committed to implementing the grouping’s statement on global AI governance and emphasized wider access to AI resources and capabilities, particularly for the Global South.
That ambition raises a practical question: access through whose infrastructure, under whose standards, and with how much ability to switch?
AI depends on far more than models. Deployment increasingly touches cloud infrastructure, trusted data, identity, payment systems, and public institutions. Countries that retain control over enough of those surrounding layers have greater freedom to combine technologies from several sources.
India’s third way is therefore relevant beyond India. It offers emerging economies a strategy centered on preserving choice: keeping selected critical rails under national control, connecting outward through interoperable standards, and developing the institutional capacity to navigate competing technology ecosystems.
This is a more realistic vision of digital sovereignty for the Global South.
A multipolar digital economy will be shaped not by countries that eliminate dependence, but by those able to keep dependence diversified, interoperable, and negotiable.
