By Arvind Padmanabhan, IANS,
Durban : Leaders at the BRICS Summit – where the Indian delegation was headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – Wednesday approved the creation of a bank on the lines of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to address the development needs of emerging and poor economies.
The next 12 months will be spent on working out the modalities of creating the bank, it was announced here Wednesday on the conclusion of the plenary of the two-day Summit.
Finance ministers of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa had Tuesday agreed on the BRICS bank. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram represented India at the meeting.
The proposal for the bank, with a collective foreign exchange reserve and a fund for financing developmental projects, was mooted to counter the influence of other global institutions like the World Bank, which are more tuned to pursuing policies set by the West.
The five-member BRICS bloc collectively accounts for about 40 percent of the world’s population, 30 percent of the world’s land mass, 20 percent of the gross domestic product in real terms and 26 percent of purchasing power.
(Arvind Padmanabhan can be contacted at [email protected])