In his opening address at the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on September 12, prime minister Narendra Modi did something India's diplomacy has been building towards for three years: he moved the ‘Voice of the Global South’ from a slogan to a work plan. Addressing the leaders, he argued that the architecture of global governance built in the twentieth century has outlived its relevance, and that the moment has come to replace what he called a "pyramid of privilege" with a "platform of partnership" in which every nation has a stake and a say.

 

Modi came up with the possible solution in the form of triple R: representation, responsiveness, and rule-making. On representation, he was unambiguous: reform of the UN Security Council can no longer be deferred, and negotiations on it must be tied to a fixed timetable with concrete outcomes. He extended the same logic to the Bretton Woods institutions, arguing that voting power, leadership roles, and policy priorities at global financial institutions must be brought in line with present-day economic weight, so that the countries actually driving world growth get a proportionate say in economic governance. 

 

On responsiveness, the message was that multilateral bodies must actually deliver for developing nations on climate finance, technology access, and debt relief – not merely acknowledge their concerns in communiqués. And on rule-making, Modi's argument was structural: the Global South cannot remain a permanent rule-taker in trade, technology, and finance; it must have equal standing in writing the rules of tomorrow's economy, from AI governance to critical mineral supply chains.

 

Modi did not stop at setting principles, he went ahead with actionable roadmap stating that that BRICS should draft a ten-point roadmap for global governance reform, to be finalised by the time of the next summit – converting an aspiration into a bloc-level commitment with a timeline. To ensure this roadmap does not dissolve into another unimplemented declaration, he backed it with institutional plumbing: a "Troika" mechanism linking the outgoing, current, and incoming BRICS chairs to preserve continuity across presidencies, and a secure digital repository to track commitments and outcomes across summits. 

 

He also floated concrete, deliverable-oriented ideas, such as a Seafarers' Emergency Support Network, signalling that the Global South agenda under India's stewardship is meant to produce tangible instruments, not just position papers.

 

Taken together, the message was consistent with what Sri Modi has argued at BRICS, G20, and the two Voice of Global South Summits since 2023: that two-thirds of humanity remains inadequately represented in institutions designed for a different century, and that credibility now depends on visible, time-bound change rather than symbolic accommodation.

 

This is precisely the gap that India's own institutional response – DAKSHIN (Development and Knowledge Sharing Initiative) – was built to fill. Inaugurated at the second Voice of Global South Summit in November 2023 and hosted by the Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), DAKSHIN was conceived as a **Global South Centre of Excellence**: a standing platform for South-South cooperation rather than a one-off pledge. Its relevance to Modi's 3R framework is direct. 

 

On representation, with its 164 partner institutions across 95 nations, DAKSHIN provides opportunity to smaller and less-resourced developing countries a shared institutional home to aggregate their priorities before they reach forums like the UN or the G20, turning fragmented voices into a coordinated one. On responsiveness, its model explicitly breaks from the old donor-recipient template: it positions India's own development experience – in digital public infrastructure, affordable healthcare delivery, climate change and disaster-resilient infrastructure – as a resource for mutual learning, co-produced with partner countries rather than dispensed to them. And on rule-making, DAKSHIN's ambition to institutionalise triangular cooperation, bringing in multilateral agencies alongside bilateral partners, is a small-scale rehearsal for the very rule-shaping role Modi wants the wider Global South to assume.

 

DAKSHIN can play the function of a continuous secretariat-like body for Global South initiatives — tracking projects, convening young diplomats, and maintaining institutional memory that outlives any single summit cycle.

 

The credibility of Modi’s speech will be judged not by its rhetoric but by whether the ten-point roadmap acquires real deadlines and India uses its BRICS chairmanship to enforce them. On that count, India does not need to build new capacity from scratch. DAKSHIN already exists as a working proof of concept – modest in scale, but structurally aligned with exactly the representation, responsiveness, and rule-making agenda Modi has now asked the wider BRICS grouping to deliver. Scaling it, rather than reinventing it, may be the fastest way to turn Bharat Mandapam's promises into outcomes the Global South can actually bank on.