Behind the red carpets, motorcades and ceremonial welcomes for BRICS leaders is a tightly coordinated aviation operation involving around 35 special aircraft, multiple airports, controlled airspace and carefully timed movements to accommodate foreign dignitaries without disrupting Delhi’s regular commercial flights.

The operation spans the Indira Gandhi International Airport, the Indian Air Force’s Palam technical area and other airports being used to park visiting aircraft. The CISF, Air Force, aviation authorities, airport operator and other security agencies are coordinating the movements.

For regular passengers, the airport operation begins with processing inside the terminal before they board their aircraft via an aerobridge. VVIP movements are kept separate. Ceremonial facilities are used for senior visitors such as ministers and other high-ranking dignitaries, while the highest-level visitors are handled through the Palam technical area.

The Palam facility allows VVIP aircraft to arrive outside the regular passenger-terminal operation, with the principal and delegation moved directly into a separately secured ground arrangement.

A senior CISF official aware of the arrangements said the movement from the aircraft to the convoy is also planned to prevent the final route from becoming predictable. “Multiple exits and vehicles are kept ready, with the exit ultimately used for the VVIP movement decided towards the last stage,” the source said.

The larger exercise is taking place in the air as well.

During a normal VVIP movement in major cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad, the airspace is regulated for about three to four minutes to accommodate the special aircraft. With several foreign leaders arriving and departing during the summit, these controlled windows have been extended and coordinated more extensively to provide clear movement windows for the special aircraft, the source said.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation has imposed restrictions on non-scheduled flight operations within a 300-km radius of Delhi from September 11 to 13. Scheduled commercial flights are exempt, while special flights carrying BRICS dignitaries and related flights can operate with prior approval.

The restrictions are particularly relevant to non-registered private, light aircraft, whose movements are not part of the regular airline schedule. Such aircraft are being subjected to verification and specific conditions to reduce potential security risks during the summit, the source said.

Scheduled airlines, meanwhile, are being fitted around the VVIP movements. Their arrival and departure timings have been adjusted by about 10-15 minutes ahead of the summit, where necessary, to prevent their movements from coinciding with a special aircraft.

If an overlap still occurs, an aircraft may be held in the air for some time or directed to land at another airport temporarily, depending on the traffic situation and operational requirements.

Parking the special aircraft is another part of the exercise. Besides Palam and Delhi Airport, Noida International Airport, Safdarjung Airport, Hindon Airport and two other airports have been incorporated into the wider parking plan.

The aircraft will also arrive in different configurations. According to the CISF source, around 70-75% of participating countries are expected to bring one dedicated aircraft, while 10-15% could bring two aircraft. Another 10-15% are expected to use scheduled flights.

Security operations extend to the aircraft once they are on the ground. The CISF official said additional checks are carried out during ground handling, including testing two samples of the aviation fuel supplied to an aircraft, as part of measures to rule out tampering or other security concerns.

The wider airspace has also been tightened to reduce other potential sources of disruption. Flying activities involving light and micro-light aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles have been restricted within a 300-km radius of Delhi during the summit.

At the airport, CISF personnel operate within the aviation-security framework laid down by the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security, while the Air Force manages the technical-area operation and other agencies handle the diplomatic, intelligence, traffic and road-security aspects of VVIP movements.

The result is a carefully separated system in which dedicated aircraft can be received, parked and moved under enhanced security while Delhi’s scheduled aviation continues around them.

For the agencies involved, the task is therefore not simply to secure the arrival of special aircraft, but to sequence each movement — in the air, on the ground and through the airport — so that an exceptional concentration of VVIP traffic does not interrupt the routine flow of commercial aviation.

Published – September 12, 2026 09:31 am IST

Chinese President Xi Jinping left for New Delhi on Saturday morning to attend the 18th BRICS Summit.

He is scheduled to hold talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the summit.

Mr. Xi left Beijing to attend the BRICS Summit at the invitation of Prime Minister Modi, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

His entourage includes close associate Cai Qi, who is a member of the high-powered Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and director of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee, and Wang Yi, Foreign Minister and member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, the news report said.

– PTI

The story so far:

The 18th BRICS summit in New Delhi to be held in September, with India as the Chair, is expected to push for mechanisms to facilitate cross-border payments between members, including links between digital payment systems and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), according to a report in The Hindu businessLine. Ahead of the summit, finance ministries’ and central bank representatives from BRICS countries met in Jaipur on August 12-13 to discuss financial cooperation, payments, and the wider use of national currencies in settling trade between members.

How do current cross-border payments work?

Sending money from one country to another requires a chain of transactions. Let’s say, an importer in Cape Town is buying passenger cars from an exporter in Chennai. The payment does not travel directly from the South African bank to the Indian one. It travels via a series of intermediaries called correspondent banks that hold accounts with each other. Since the South African bank does not hold an account with the Indian one (and vice versa), the payment is routed through a larger international bank that deals with both and is typically headquartered in London or New York. Because very few banks hold both rupees and rand, the payment involves converting rand to dollars and dollars to rupees where, in essence, the dollar acts like a vehicle currency, even though no American is involved in the trade.

What is SWIFT?

Now, apart from the money, there are also instructions that travel between the banks. This is handled by SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), which is a Belgium-based cooperative and overseen by the National Bank of Belgium along with the G-10 central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve. SWIFT is a messaging network, like a secure post-office. It enables institutions to exchange payment instructions through it and settle amounts separately. It is used directly by more than 11,000 institutions in over 200 countries. Smaller banks reach it indirectly through larger banks that are part of the SWIFT network, which is why it has become crucial and hard to displace.

What are the costs involved in each step?

Every intermediary charges a fee and the currencies are converted twice (rand to dollar and dollar to rupees). So the foreign exchange margins are paid twice. A 2019 BRICS survey of cross-border payment systems, conducted by Brazil, found that Brazilian respondents reported foreign exchange margins of 2.5% with the figure rising to 8.5% for payments in Africa and, in some cases, as high as 20%.

While speed of transactions used to be a major issue, SWIFT claims that its SWIFT Global Payments Innovation has helped reduce transaction times significantly. Some structural delays remain even as the transaction chain has also become thinner. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) found that active correspondent banking relationships fell by 20% between 2011 and 2018 with regional declines varying from 12% to 30% and Latin America being the worst affected. The reasons for this decline were largely commercial. Payment volumes kept growing during this period, even as they travelled through a smaller network.

Why does BRICS want to change this system?

For developing economies, though, payments in a handful of dominant currencies such as the U.S. dollar, the euro and the Japanese yen expose countries to the monetary policies of the countries that issue them. The 2024 BRICS report under Russia’s chairmanship argued that this part of the financial system is monopolised by a single institution, raising transaction costs. Alternatives to the system suffer from the fact that they have to convince a large number of banks and regulators to join before being useful. A bank that uses an alternative system to deal with sanctioned entities — several Russian banks were cut off from SWIFT in 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — also risks sanctions, which deters others from joining. A sanctions-hit Russia has pushed hardest for an alternative and is also the reason why others are wary of joining one.

What changes can be envisaged in the BRICS discussions?

The idea being explored is a payment system where, instead of payments moving through several correspondent banks with dollar conversions, national payment systems would connect to each other directly. This could be done in pairs as India and Singapore have already done for remittances by linking the former’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and the latter’s PayNow systems. But building bilateral systems individually will not scale appropriately.

An alternative could be via a shared hub that each country joins. One such effort is Project Nexus, designed by the BIS and handed over to a company set up by six central banks, including India’s Reserve Bank of India. It is set to go live only in 2027. Notably, it is not a BRICS initiative.

The BRICS discussions would extend this idea to the use of central bank digital currencies. Here, central banks issue digital versions of their currencies for use between banks — a settlement asset, not the retail digital rupee held by individuals — and exchange them on a common platform. Both legs of a currency swap would occur at the same instant or not at all, removing the risk of paying out before the other side pays, which speeds up settlement and reduces the capital banks must set aside against such transactions.

The 2024 BRICS report claims transactions settled this way would yield significant cost savings. Only one such platform runs today – mBridge, built by the BIS with the central banks of China, Thailand, Hong Kong, and the UAE, which the BIS handed to its participants and left in October 2024. Over 95% of its settlement volume is in China’s digital yuan, according to People’s Bank of China figures reported by Reuters.

The Kazan declaration of BRICS in 2024 agreed to “discuss and study the feasibility” of an independent settlement system called BRICS Clear, but the Rio declaration the following year did not mention it.

What is India’s position?

India’s own proposal, reported in January, is that members link their CBDCs for trade and tourism payments. Indian officials have been careful to frame the payment systems as a means of cutting transaction costs and speeding up settlement rather than as initiatives to displace the dollar — even as Russian proposals, and those of some Brazilian economists, have gone further, towards alternative financial systems that would reduce dependence on the dollar.

U.S. President Donald Trump, in November 2024, had threatened to impose 100% tariffs on BRICS countries if they moved away from the dollar and a further 10% tariff on countries aligning with vaguely defined “anti-American” BRICS policies during last year’s Rio summit. The threats were not carried out. But even though they were not targeted at payment systems, this could perhaps be a reason why Indian officials have framed discussions only as a matter of reducing transaction costs.

Published – September 06, 2026 02:16 am IST