Showcased at the Bharat Innovates Exposition, Indian innovators advanced magnet-free electric powertrains, autonomous marine inspection robotics, and Industry 4.0 competency hubs to decarbonize mobility and modernize manufacturing.
India used the sidelines of the 18th BRICS Summit to stage its second major deep-tech showcase of 2026, and the technologies on display at the Bharat Innovates Exposition offer the clearest picture available of where the bloc’s mobility and manufacturing cooperation is actually headed, as distinct from where its declarations say it is headed.
Held at Bharat Mandapam on September 11-12, immediately ahead of the leaders’ summit itself, the exposition displayed 37 deep-tech innovations drawn from a larger 2026 cohort of 120 startups and research-park ventures, organized jointly by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of External Affairs. It was the second Bharat Innovates showcase of the year — the first was staged in Nice, France, from June 14-16 — and Union Education Minister Pralhad Joshi has described the programme’s purpose plainly: to take innovation emerging from India’s higher-education and research ecosystem and put it in front of a global audience of corporates, investors, and BRICS-country business leaders attending the parallel BRICS Business Forum.
The mobility centrepiece was a high-torque electric powertrain engineered without rare-earth elements, a design choice that eliminates dependence on neodymium and dysprosium, two magnet materials whose global supply chains run disproportionately through a small number of non-BRICS processing facilities. For an industrial bloc that has spent much of 2026 discussing technology sovereignty in computing and telecommunications, a domestically engineered motor architecture that sidesteps a foreign-controlled materials chokepoint fits the summit’s broader thesis: that critical-technology dependence on external suppliers is a strategic vulnerability worth engineering around, not merely a cost-management problem.
Marine robotics supplied the exposition’s second major mobility theme. A full-stack marine robotic platform demonstrated at Bharat Mandapam is built for ultrasonic inspection of submerged ship hulls, offshore wind foundations, and port infrastructure — tasks that currently require human divers working in conditions that are slow, costly, and genuinely hazardous. Autonomous inspection systems of this kind matter more than their narrow application might suggest, because as BRICS members expand offshore energy generation, ports, and marine infrastructure in parallel, the capacity to detect structural problems in submerged assets before they fail becomes a shared infrastructure-safety requirement across the bloc, not merely an Indian one.
Clean-energy engineering rounded out the physical-hardware displays with an advanced floating photovoltaic platform designed specifically for turbulent or structurally complex water bodies — reservoirs, canals, and coastal waters where a conventional rigid floating-solar array would struggle. Paired with the health-technology exhibits also on display — an AI-enabled cervical cancer screening tool delivering a risk assessment in under sixty seconds, and an AI-based maternal-fetal monitoring platform — the exposition’s organizers have been explicit that India’s deep-tech pitch to BRICS partners rests on cost-engineering: solutions built to function reliably in resource-constrained settings, giving them a natural fit with the technical and economic needs of markets across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America in a way capital-intensive alternatives often do not.
Industrial policy provided the institutional backbone underneath the exposition’s individual technology demonstrations. India formally joined the BRICS Centre for Industrial Competencies, a UNIDO-partnered, network-driven initiative under the bloc’s Partnership on the New Industrial Revolution, on February 4, at a ceremony at Vanijya Bhavan in New Delhi. The Centre operates as a one-stop support facility for manufacturing companies and small and medium enterprises across BRICS economies, with an explicit focus on Industry 4.0 competencies: cyber-physical automation, additive manufacturing, and productivity-enhancement practices. India designated its own National Productivity Council as the India Centre for BRICS Industrial Competencies, giving the council responsibility for capacity building and technology adoption among Indian manufacturers under the multilateral framework — a role that positions tier-two and tier-three MSME clusters, rather than only large industrial houses, as the intended beneficiaries of the bloc’s Industry 4.0 cooperation.
The summit’s mobility and industrial-cooperation agenda also intersected with an urgent maritime-security concern that had nothing to do with manufacturing hardware. Addressing the summit’s opening session, Prime Minister Modi proposed a Seafarers’ Emergency Support Network, aimed at coordinating real-time consular, engineering, and medical assistance for maritime personnel caught in conflict zones. The proposal is not abstract: India supplies roughly 12 percent of the global maritime workforce, up sharply from just over 5 percent a decade earlier, and Modi’s proposal followed a string of attacks on shipping in West Asia and the Black Sea that have killed fifteen Indian seafarers and left two more missing in 2026 alone, disruption tied directly to the conflicts around the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the broader West Asian security environment that have already forced shipping companies to reroute around historically efficient corridors.
Read together, the exposition’s hardware and the Industrial Competencies Centre’s institutional mandate describe a coherent industrial-policy bet: that India’s comparative advantage in BRICS mobility and manufacturing cooperation lies not in matching the capital intensity of established industrial powers, but in exporting cost-engineered, materials-sovereign hardware — motors that don’t need foreign magnets, robots that don’t need human divers, solar platforms that don’t need calm water — into markets across the Global South that share India’s resource constraints far more closely than they share the West’s. Whether that bet pays off in actual export orders and BRICS Startup Innovation Fund financing, rather than exposition-floor attention, will be the metric worth tracking through 2027.
– Ravindranath P
