BRICS Delhi Declaration: Potential Impact on 7 Key Indian Laws and Regulations

Home / Columns BRICS Delhi Declaration: 7 Commitments That Could Actually Change Indian Law or Regulation X 2026 BRICS Declaration raises seven key legal questions for India. The BRICS New Delhi Declaration addresses AI copyright, cross-border payments, cybercrime, gig workers, pathogens, securities settlement and research data. The New Delhi Declaration adopted at the 18th BRICS Summit has put artificial intelligence, cross-border payments, cybercrime, virtual assets, competition, customs and social security on a common regulatory agenda for the grouping, areas that could have a bearing on how India frames or updates its own laws and regulations. The 140-paragraph Declaration, adopted by BRICS leaders at the September 12-13 summit, makes clear that its commitments are to be implemented in accordance with the national laws, regulations and priorities of member states. From an Indian regulatory perspective, however, seven commitments stand out for their potential to influence existing laws, inform future rule-making and deepen cooperation between Indian regulators and their BRICS counterparts. Here are seven areas with the future regulatory implications. 1. AI Training And Copyright: From Infringement To Licensing BRICS commitment: Para 120 The Declaration calls for respect for intellectual property rights in the digital environment, specifically including their use for artificial intelligence training , and refers to fair remuneration of right holders . For India, this goes directly into an unsettled area of copyright law. The existing Copyright Act , 1957 was framed around conventional forms of copying and infringement, not the use of millions of copyrighted works as training material for generative AI models. The question of whether the existing exceptions can accommodate such use is already before the Delhi High Court in ANI Media Pvt Ltd v OpenAI . The BRICS commitment could therefore push India beyond the traditional question of whether copying constitutes infringement. The emerging legal question becomes whether AI training should operate through a statutory licensing and remuneration system . That would represent a significant redesign of copyright law. 2. Cross-Border Payments: From Indian Payment Regulation To Interoperable Payment Systems BRICS commitment: Para 90 The Declaration supports work on interoperability between payment and messaging channels, faster and cheaper cross-border payments, and greater use of BRICS local currencies for trade and investment. India already regulates cross-border payment aggregators and has been working to link UPI with foreign fast-payment systems. RBI has also joined Project Nexus , which seeks to interlink domestic fast-payment systems multilaterally. But a BRICS-wide payment architecture raises questions that domestic payment law does not answer neatly: which regulator has jurisdiction over a transaction, how customer data can move between jurisdictions, how fraud liability is allocated, how AML and KYC requirements are reconciled, and how settlement is legally recognised across countries. The implication for India is a shift from regulating cross-border transactions entering or leaving India to regulating interoperable payment infrastructure connecting multiple sovereign systems . That could require a new layer of RBI, Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) and payment-system rules. 3. Cybercrime: From Domestic Offences To Cross-Border Evidence BRICS commitment: Paras 47-48 The Declaration encourages states to sign and ratify the UN Convention against Cybercrime and supports negotiations for a supplementary protocol. It also calls for cooperation on cybercrime, data security, malicious software and globally interoperable rules and standards. India already has cybercrime offences and procedures for electronic evidence. But the central difficulty in modern cybercrime is increasingly not defining the offence. It is obtaining the evidence. A fraud committed against an Indian victim