Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Johannesburg, the capital of South Africa, to attend the BRICS 2023 summit.
India will be the growth engine of the world in the coming years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Tuesday. Speaking at the BRICS Business Forum Leaders’ Dialogue in Johannesburg, South Africa, Modi said despite the turmoil in the global economy, "India is currently the fastest-growing major economy in the world" and "soon, India will become a $5 trillion economy."
The top Indian leader also said that over the past 10 years, the BRICS Business Council has played a very important role in "enhancing our economic cooperation."
"When the first BRICS summit was held in 2009, the world was coming out of a major economic crisis," he said, adding at that time, BRICS was seen as “a ray of hope for the global economy."
Modi arrived in Johannesburg on Tuesday on a visit to South Africa from Aug. 22-24 to attend the 15th BRICS Summit. From South Africa, he will travel to Athens, Greece on Aug. 25, India’s Foreign Ministry said earlier.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Wednesday said India’s historic and successful landing of its spacecraft Chandrayaan-3 on the moon is a momentous occasion for the BRICS family.
“We would like to congratulate India particularly as you speak about the need for cooperation in space. In a few hours, India’s spacecraft Chandrayaan-3 will be landing on the moon. We congratulate you,” Ramaphosa said in a BRICS plenary session on Wednesday morning before the spacecraft landed.
“This for us, as a BRICS family, is a momentous occasion and we rejoice with you. We join you in the joy of this great achievement,” Ramaphosa told Prime Minister Narendra Modi and thanked him for proposing that there should be a BRICS space cooperation system.
India on Wednesday created history as its moon mission Chandrayaan-3 conducted a successful landing, thus becoming the first country to have landed on the lunar South Pole.
“We have achieved the soft landing on the moon. India is on the moon,” chief of Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Sreedhara Panicker Somanath told Modi, who joined the event virtually.
India has now joined a list of handful countries - the US, Russia, and China - who have successfully landed a spacecraft on the moon.
BRICS is a bloc of emerging economies that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Its leaders are currently meeting for the bloc’s 15th summit in Johannesburg.
BRICS currently makes up a quarter of the global economy, accounting for a fifth of global trade, and is home to more than 40% of the world’s population.