In this issue, BRICS Business Magazine presents BRICS+ Impact & Connectivity, a new international initiative co-initiated by Akashdeep Singh, President of the Indian Business Council in Russia, whose first full cycle is planned for 2027.
It will focus on companies and projects from BRICS and the wider BRICS+ world that do more than grow, export or enter new markets. The focus will be on those that create measurable public, economic, technological, cultural or infrastructural value while making countries, markets, cities, institutions and professional communities more connected.
BRICS+ Impact & Connectivity will bring together two formats: the BRICS+ Impact & Connectivity Award and the BRICS+ Impact & Connectivity Conference. Their common purpose is to identify projects that are already building practical links across the BRICS+ world.
Interviewer: Natalia Shastik
The initiative is being developed as a partnership. Alongside Akashdeep Singh, its co-initiators are Veronika Zonabend, social entrepreneur and co-founder of the Noôdome community, media executive Arman Jilavian, and Alexey Anischenko, member of the Noôdome Board of Directors. Each brings a different part of the future platform: international community, media and communications, strategic partnerships and business architecture.
BRICS Business Magazine spoke to Akashdeep Singh about BRICS+ Impact & Connectivity, business as a language of trust and the projects that will show whether BRICS works in practice.
Because, in the end, connections show whether cooperation works. We often speak about BRICS in terms of scale: population, GDP, resources, trade, logistics, technology. That is necessary, but not enough. The next question is more practical. Who is already working with whom? Which projects actually link countries? Where does interest become a contract, a factory, a lab, an education programme, a cultural exchange or a joint venture?
After the expansion of BRICS, this question has become sharper and relevant. Institutional scale is no longer enough. We need a better way to see what is already working: which companies, cities, universities, investors and professional communities are turning cooperation into something concrete.
Connectivity is not an abstract word. It is a Russian company learning how to enter the Indian market. It is an Indian entrepreneur finding a partner in a Russian region. It is a technology developed in one country being adapted in another. It is an urban practice or a production model becoming intelligible beyond its home market.
BRICS becomes real not only at summits. It becomes real where such connections appear.
India and Russia are large, deep and very different countries. They have a long history of goodwill. But goodwill is not enough in business.
I have lived between these two worlds for many years. I know that cooperation often begins not with a grand strategy, but with a simple question: how do we understand each other? An Indian company may come to Russia with a strong product, yet little sense of regional realities, business culture or the rhythm of negotiation. A Russian company may see enormous potential in India, yet underestimate the complexity and diversity of that market. The interest is there. The route is often missing.
Much of my work has been about those routes: connecting people, explaining context, reducing stereotypes and helping entrepreneurs see one another not as something exotic, but as potential partners.
Over the years I have seen strong projects in business, education, technology, culture and regional development. Many remain almost invisible to a wider international audience. Partners know them. Sector specialists may know them. But the wider BRICS ecosystem often does not.
BRICS+ Impact & Connectivity came from that observation. We need to become better at seeing those who are already making BRICS cooperation practical.
It means two things that should be looked at together. Impact is value that can be described and, where possible, verified. It may be social, economic, environmental, technological, educational, cultural or infrastructural. The point is that we are not talking about intention. We are talking about results. Connectivity is a project’s ability to link markets, countries, regions, companies, institutions, specialists and communities. It may take the form of localisation, joint development, knowledge transfer, a new supply chain, an industry standard, an investment or a partnership between cities.
What matters is where the two meet. A medical technology, for example, may improve access to diagnostics in one region while connecting clinics, engineers, universities and investors from several BRICS+ countries. Such a project is not merely an exports story. Nor is it only a social initiative. It is connectivity in action.
These are the stories that matter for BRICS. They show movement, not just potential.
If an award does not help the market understand whom to trust and which projects actually work, it is not needed.
We know this. BRICS+ Impact & Connectivity should not become another showcase. There are enough showcases. What is needed is a tool that can identify strong projects, bring them to the attention of a professional audience and show how value is created.
The award will look at impact and connectivity together. That is the difference. We are not interested only in sustainability, only in innovation or only in international expansion. We are interested in the combination.
It is also important that participation should not substitute for recognition. What should be assessed is the project: its results, its connectivity, its ability to scale and the credibility of its evidence. Not the status of the company, and not its proximity to the organisers.
For many years, I have lived between two worlds: India and Russia. Over the years I have seen strong projects in business, education, technology, culture and regional development. Many remain almost invisible to a wider international audience. BRICS+ Impact & Connectivity came from that observation. We need to become better at seeing those who are already making BRICS cooperation practical
It will have two connected parts.
The first is the BRICS+ Impact & Connectivity Award, an international award for medium-sized and large companies from BRICS and BRICS+ countries. It will focus on projects that combine measurable value with international connectivity.
The second is the BRICS+ Impact & Connectivity Conference. This will be a business platform where projects can be discussed not only as award entries, but as possible subjects for investment, development partnerships, sectoral cooperation and regional engagement.
The award asks: who is already doing serious work? The conference asks: what can be done next, and with whom?
From the start, the initiative is being built as a partnership. My co-initiators are Veronika Zonabend, Arman Jilavian and Alexey Anischenko. That combination is deliberate. This cannot be only an award, only a media project or only a business meeting. It needs community, trust, strategic partnerships, international communications and a close understanding of how companies actually work.
An initiative of this kind needs a setting that works with context, not only with news. In that sense, BRICS Business Magazine is a natural platform.
The magazine has long treated BRICS not merely as a sequence of official decisions, but through companies, leaders, ideas, technologies, investment, cities, universities and culture. Cooperation rarely begins with a document. It begins when people understand who is in front of them, how they think, what they want, where their strengths lie and where a shared interest may be found.
BRICS Business Magazine brings context, an audience and an editorial language for discussing BRICS through people, companies and concrete markets. At the same time, the magazine’s editorial independence must remain separate from the organisational and commercial parts of the award. Trust depends on that separation.
It also matters that the magazine is widening its linguistic and country focus. The Russian-Chinese track is a good example. In BRICS+, translating words is not enough. You have to translate meaning. A good project has to be made legible to another audience, so that it sees not a foreign experience, but a possible partnership.
India is one of the world’s key markets and one of its great sources of entrepreneurial energy. But for BRICS its importance is not only a matter of scale.
India lives with diversity. Languages, regions, religions, levels of development and business cultures are not abstractions for us. They are daily reality. That makes the Indian experience especially relevant to any discussion of connectivity.
Through the Indian Business Council in Russia, we see that business tires quickly of general formulas. Companies need routes they can follow: whom to speak to, where trust can be tested, how to enter a market, who has already made the journey and which sectors are ready for cooperation.
BRICS+ Impact & Connectivity can become one of the places where Indian companies and institutions are presented through real projects: technology, manufacturing, education, finance, infrastructure, creative industries and regional development.
This matters to me because India and Russia, like other BRICS countries, can do far more if they learn to see not only each other’s state agendas, but also each other’s entrepreneurial energy.
In 2026 we are presenting the initiative and building its foundations. The first full cycle is planned for 2027.
That means a call for entries, expert review, interviews, project verification, a shortlist, a conference and an award ceremony. Before that, we need to define the host country and city, the host partners, the expert council, the jury, the award secretariat and the calendar.
We do not want to hurry for the sake of a date. For an initiative like this, it is not enough to announce an attractive name. The architecture has to be sound from the start: clear criteria, proper procedure, independent assessment, careful communication and respect for different markets. If that is done well, BRICS+ Impact & Connectivity can become an annual platform, not a one-off event.
Companies that can answer two simple questions. What measurable value does your project create? And what connections does it strengthen?
The sector may be almost anything: industry, technology, medicine, education, finance, agriculture, logistics, energy, culture, digital services or the urban environment. What matters is the quality of the result.
We are interested in projects that help markets understand each other, technologies travel, knowledge circulate, regions find partners and societies gain new opportunities.
BRICS is often described as a large structure. In practice, it is made of people, teams, factories, laboratories, universities, ports, cultural centres and city programmes. We want to see that work more clearly and give it a language.
I would like BRICS+ Impact & Connectivity to become a way of looking at BRICS through projects. Not only through statements, summits and macroeconomics, but through companies, solutions, teams and partnerships that are already working. If every year we can find and present such projects; if they begin to recognise one another; if new ties form around them, then the initiative will have served its purpose.
After all, BRICS is not built only in negotiating rooms. It is built wherever shared experience takes shape: in a factory, a laboratory, a classroom, a port, a city programme or a cultural project.
If BRICS has a future as a space of practical cooperation, it will be visible there: in joint work that has already begun, but has not yet found a common language.
