Indian PM leaves for Brazil to attend BRICS summit

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has left for Brazil today to attend the BRICS summit on July 14 and 15. After a stopover in Berlin tonight, he will leave for Fortaleza, the north-eastern coastal city of Brazil, tomorrow to attend the five nation summit. The sixth summit of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa or BRICS will follow up on the decisions of the Durban meet held last year. In this summit, the BRICS Development Bank is likely to take the shape with a corpus of 100 billion US dollars, about which there was a broad agreement in Durban. Besides holding bilateral and multilateral talks with each other, the BRICS leaders will be engaged with various activities such as issuing declarations, signing treaties and meeting with the heads of South American nations during the summit. On the sidelines of the summit, Modi will be meeting South African President Jacob Zuma besides host President Dilma Roussef of Brazil. He is also scheduled to have bilateral dialogues with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Before departure for Brazil, Narendra Modi said India attaches high importance to the BRICS forum for promoting global economic growth, peace and stability. ‘In the course of the past five summits and several ministerial and official processes, BRICS has made major strides in pursuit of these goals,’ he said. He said, the Summit theme, ‘Inclusive Growth; Sustainable Development’, will enable us to shape the post-2015 Development Agenda being discussed in the United Nations, according to BSS.