Here’s How India During its G20 Summit Presidency Plans to Lead the Global South

The decision by India to lead the global south has significant diplomatic implications. It increases India’s contribution to solving the numerous problems that the world community is currently confronting.

India has assumed the initiative in the specific context of the G20 summit to represent the wider concerns of the developing nations in the conversations on monetary and fiscal issues, as well as bigger formative ones, within this more constrained and concentrated group of the world’s top 20 economies, which was originally established to deal with more intentionally urgent emerging issues of international growth and financial consistency.

India’s take on Global South issues at G20 Summit

In a way, India’s decision to take the initiative and speak up for the issues of the Global South also supports a multi-polar or multidimensional world. India’s reputation as a nation with the ability to motivate and impact the Global South provides it additional diplomatic and political clout when dealing with all of its allies, like the US, and all of its enemies, like China.

India’s economy, which currently ranks fifth in the world, has a good chance of overtaking the US by 2030. According to the Imf, India’s development this year, at over 7%, will be the strongest among the main economies, despite the pressures on the world economy and hints of a downturn in certain advanced economies.

India now has the economic might to support its voice. Other developing nations can benefit from imitating its successes in advancing digitalization and connecting technology to the demands of the nation’s development, whether in the fields of significant benefit schemes, payment services, construction of a unique identification system (Aadhaar), etc.

India has managed the Covid-19 emergency better than so many developed economies because it relied on its capabilities to immunize its exploding population as well as supply desperately needed immunizations to a huge number of emerging nations at a time when the advanced nations were stockpiling them for household purposes. India has moreover given a few struggling developing nations food and medical supplies as humanitarian help.

The fact that India is leading the G20 summit after Indonesia while being continued by Brazil and South Africa demonstrates the growing influence of the Global South on decisions concerning monetary sustainability, economic expansion, and other topics that are now on the G20 agenda, such as debt restructuring, climatic change finance, energy revolution, achieving the SDGs, result of physical and confidentiality, food and fuel safety, etc.

On January 12 and 13, India hosted a virtual Voice of the South Summit 2023 that featured a Foreign Ministers Conference as well as a Leaders Session. At least 120 nations took part. India’s ideas and aims in hosting this conference are spelled out in the speeches delivered on the occasion by its Prime Minister as well as its Minister of External Affairs.

India’s decision to assume the Global South’s leadership demonstrates its ambition to expand its influence in global governance. India is concentrating on advancing efforts to find answers to the numerous critical problems that the world community is now confronting. As with all the problems India is bringing up are currently on the international agenda and coming up with solutions in a setting of a heightened East-West split will be a lengthy process that extends beyond India’s G20 summit chairmanship. It will be more challenging if the North turns inward as its economy is under strain.