BRICS TCIM Alliance and Genomic Networks
Anchored by WHO’s Jamnagar Centre and NIMHANS Bengaluru, BRICS health accords advance a proposed TCIM working group, a mental-health centres-of-excellence network, and shared negotiating ground on pathogen access and benefit-sharing.
Public health and life-sciences cooperation emerged from the 18th BRICS Summit’s New Delhi Declaration as one of the bloc’s most institutionally developed tracks, built on ministerial work completed months before the leaders’ meeting itself. The foundational document is the joint declaration of the 16th BRICS Health Ministers’ Meeting, held in Chandigarh on July 23-24 under India’s 2026 chairship, which committed member states to a strengthened BRICS Tuberculosis Research Network, a regional early-warning mechanism for infectious disease, closer coordination among national drug regulators, and a dedicated network of centres focused on mental wellness. The New Delhi Declaration folds each commitment into its own health chapter and adds leaders’-level endorsement.
The most closely watched of these commitments concerns Traditional, Complementary, and Integrative Medicine, or TCIM. The New Delhi Declaration welcomes the proposed establishment of a BRICS Expert Working Group on TCIM under the bloc’s Health Track — language that matters for accuracy, since the group exists at the proposal stage rather than as an operating body with a secretariat and calendar of meetings. Union Minister of State Prataprao Jadhav, who holds the Ayush portfolio alongside a junior health ministry role, has said the recognition marks an important step toward strengthening international cooperation on traditional medicine, and that the working group is meant to give member states a structured platform for sharing knowledge and research approaches. That framing follows through from a dedicated BRICS Meeting on TCIM held in Chandigarh on July 21, two days ahead of the broader Health Ministers’ gathering.
The declaration links this TCIM push explicitly to the World Health Organization’s Global Traditional Medicine Centre in Jamnagar, Gujarat, and to the objectives of the WHO’s Global Traditional Medicine Strategy 2025-2034. The WHO’s own statements on the summit describe the declaration as the strongest endorsement TCIM has yet received from the BRICS grouping, noting that the proposed working group’s mandate would cover research collaboration, evidence generation, capacity building, and — critically for the diverse pharmacopoeial traditions in play across the bloc’s eleven members — knowledge exchange on regulatory approaches. The declaration pairs that ambition with an insistence on evidence-informed validation: it calls for TCIM practices and products to meet quality, safety, and efficacy standards through national regulatory frameworks tailored to each member’s own legal context, rather than a single harmonized BRICS pharmacopoeia standard. For readers following the intersection of Ayurveda, Siddha, and Unani systems with molecular pharmacology, the practical significance is that BRICS-level cooperation on botanical medicine will proceed through national regulators working alongside a shared knowledge-exchange platform, not through a supranational approval authority.
Mental health cooperation received its own institutional anchor at Bengaluru’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, which the New Delhi Declaration designates as the coordinating hub for a new BRICS network of centres of excellence on mental well-being. Reporting on the declaration describes NIMHANS’s role as a training hub and Centre of Excellence coordinator for the network, tasked with fostering evidence-based psychiatric interventions and prioritizing support for children and adolescents facing psychosocial distress, particularly in emergency and disaster contexts. The institutional logic mirrors the GRAIN model in the computing and quantum space: rather than build parallel national mental-health research infrastructure five or six times over, BRICS members pool epidemiological and clinical expertise through a single coordinating node, with NIMHANS’s genomic and neuro-epidemiological research base positioning India as that node for the bloc’s mental-health agenda.
Non-communicable disease prevention rounds out the health-ministerial architecture through the BRICS Mission for Healthy Lifestyle, a 2026-2029 roadmap endorsed alongside the mental-health and TCIM initiatives, aimed at coordinating preventive-health platforms and digital diagnostics across primary-care systems as obesity and lifestyle-disease burdens rise across member economies.
The declaration’s most consequential — and most contested — health commitment concerns global pandemic governance rather than bilateral BRICS cooperation. Leaders called for constructive engagement in the ongoing negotiations over the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing Annex to the WHO Pandemic Agreement, the treaty the World Health Assembly adopted on May 20, 2025, in response to gaps in global cooperation exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The stakes here are structural: under Article 31 of the Pandemic Agreement, the treaty cannot open for signature until the PABS Annex itself is finalized, and the annex remains contested precisely over whether sharing pathogen samples should be mandatorily linked to sharing the benefits — vaccines, diagnostics, and intellectual property — subsequently derived from them. The New Delhi Declaration’s position reaffirms the sovereign right of states to legislate over access to their own biological resources, a stance aligned with the developing-world negotiating position that has slowed the annex’s finalization but that its proponents argue is necessary to prevent a repeat of the inequitable vaccine access seen during COVID-19.
Taken together, the health and life-sciences track illustrates a pattern visible across the summit’s other disciplinary outcomes: India has positioned specific domestic institutions — NIMHANS in Bengaluru, the Ministry of Ayush’s regulatory apparatus, and its own negotiating stance on pathogen sovereignty — as the operational anchors through which BRICS-level commitments will be implemented. Whether the proposed TCIM Expert Working Group and the mental-health centres-of-excellence network move from declared intent to functioning institutions with budgets and meeting calendars will depend on the same working-group process that produced the Chennai Consensus and the Chandigarh health declaration in the first place, and the next concrete milestone worth watching is a first meeting of the TCIM working group, not any immediate clinical or regulatory change.
– Dr. Jagan Mohan Somagoni
