Prelude International BRICS Meeting

Date: 30th September-1st October, 2016
Venue: CONFERENCE ROOM – II, India International Centre 40, Max Mueller Marg, New Delhi -110003

As India gears up to host the 8th BRICS summit at Goa later in October 2016, the world glues at the big event watching even more closely. Over fifty ministerial and official meetings and events are being organized having “Building Responsive, Inclusive and Collective Solutions as the core-theme with a special focus on institution-building, implementing past commitments, and exploring innovative solutions in a spirit of continuity with consolidation. The BRICS is also going to focus on People-to-People interactions, business, youth, and sports as the priority areas The event also marks the announcement of first investment by National Development Bank and the first loan (in Yuan).
Certainly, the Civil Society is also looking at the event with hopes of getting their voices heard by the officials and ministers, during a special event ‘BRICS Civil 2016’, to be organized at New Delhi on October 3-4, 2016, at New Delhi. The event is being hosted by Development Partnership Administration (DPA) -II (Ministry of External Affairs), think tank -Research and Information System (RIS) and Forum for Indian development Cooperation (FIDC). The event is going to host around 400 Civil Society experts from BRICS and other parts of the world.
VANI with the support of HBS, being the national platform for Indian civil society and also one of the founding members of FIDC, is organizing a two days prelude meeting for experts on 30th September – 1st October, 2016, at New Delhi.

Objective: Creating and organizing a collaborative space (with government) for smooth function of civil society in the context of BRICS framework
The purpose of this meeting is to having discussion on how to make an effective civil society in the context of current challenging environment (regulatory reforms, shrinking resources and capacity building of CSO’s) and potential resource exchange among BRICS countries, etc. apart from this VANI is coming up with five thematic papers on;

• Food Security and Agriculture: India like other BRICS countries requires adequate food availability and access to food security. Agriculture plays an important role in providing food, as well as, is an important source of income in a primarily agriculture-based economy like India. This paper seeks to explore challenges and status of food security and agriculture in India within the larger context of BRICS agenda.
• Poverty and Inequality: to gauge the progress of development, understand the GDP and HDI and analyze the poverty and inequality in the BRICS countries with especial focus to INDIA.
• Financial reforms: analyses India's domestic economic policies in conformance with its aspirations of achieving Globalization and Liberalization, that are juxtaposed with various socio-economic problems that need critical attention through robust macroeconomic solutions.
• Progress monitoring of National Development Bank: if the NDB is being successful in targeting pro poor agenda to reduce inequality within the BRICS countries and in the wider objective of south -south cooperation.
• India’s investment and government grants in Africa: to find out the impact of Indian investments made by Indian companies by researching the prominent ones. The study also focuses the performance of Indian companies in India. The study will also analyze LoC and grants given by government of India to such countries and its impact, in the context of India’s development cooperation policy.

These studies are being done by VANI with the help from its members and partners, since it has been seen in the past that the grass root level civil society workers do not connect with the thematic discussions that takes place at the national and the global level. These studies are an attempt to establish the connect among all to develop an ownership by taking insight from the sector at the grass root levels. These papers will be shared with the civil society experts by the end of August to get feedback before finalization of the same before the prelude meeting. We propose to present these studies to BRICS Sherpa, to be taken to BRICS Civil, and formal BRICS at Goa.

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Information:

Shalini Yog Shah
Deputy Director
E: shalini.yog@in.boell.org