The BRICS group , New development bank .

BRICS Group

Updated: March 29, 2012
The BRICS Group is made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
The BRICS alliance has existed as a concept since 2001, when Jim O’Neill, a Goldman Sachs economist, identified Brazil, Russia, India and China as rising economic powers and argued that they should play larger roles in global economic policymaking, perhaps by joining the established Group of 7. Earlier, in the 1990s, Russia had already organized a triangular group with India and China — known as RIC — but the attention generated by Mr. O’Neill’s formulation apparently prompted these three to add Brazil and create a new political club.
The first BRIC summit meeting was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2009, amid the uncertainty of the global economic downturn, with subsequent meetings held in Brazil and China. South Africa joined in 2011. That fall, Mr. O’Neill predicted that the group’s combined economies, now worth almost $13 trillion, would double in the coming decade, eventually surpassing the size of the economies of both the United States and the European Union.
As their leaders gathered in India in March 2012, the five BRICS nations still ranked among the fastest-growing economies in the world, and, individually, their global influence continues to rise. But they have struggled to find the common ground necessary to act as a unified geopolitical alliance.
The BRICS are still a new group, and some analysts argue that with time they could become a more cohesive alliance. But for now, they are troubled by internal rivalries and contradictions that have stymied the group’s ability to take any significant action toward a primary goal: reforming Western-dominated international financial institutions.
Since its inception, the group has discussed creating a development bank to rival the World Bank. Yet to date the proposal has been stalled, partly over worries that China would dominate the new institution.
The group was unable to agree in 2011 on a new leader for the International Monetary Fund, or to endorse a candidate in 2012 to lead the World Bank. In other spheres, the group has been splintered. National security and terrorism are common concerns, yet the members are not always in alignment, the most recent division being Iran’s nuclear ambitions. 
Deep internal political and economic differences complicate the prospects for unity. India, Brazil and South Africa are democracies and have already used their own separate trilateral group, IBSA, as a primary platform for coordinating positions on several major diplomatic issues.
Russia, however, has drifted away from democracy toward strongman rule under Vladimir V. Putin. China is the world’s largest authoritarian state and has by far the largest and most powerful economy in BRICS, which creates a complicated dynamic. China is the heavyweight, and thus the natural leader of the group, except that it is the political outlier.
As such, distrust is high between India and China, whose border dispute, which goes back decades, is fueling a quiet military buildup on both sides.