The BRICS summit has wrapped up after the predictable photo-ops and handshakes. While the leaders from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa gathered for the 18th BRICS Summit and, after much maneuvering, also managed to have a declaration, a new report has cast a shadow over one of the bloc’s signature institutions: the New Development Bank (NDB).
More than a decade after it was launched as an alternative to the Western-dominated Bretton Woods institutions, the NDB still has no independent way for communities harmed by its projects to seek redress, according to a new report released by the Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA).
For as long as the NDB has existed, it has faced a consistent critique: that an institution founded on the promise of doing development finance differently has ended up replicating the one failure its founders claimed to reject – leaving the communities impacted with no real way to be heard. Two ongoing projects in India, one in Manipur and one in Rajasthan, now offer a closer look at what that critique looks like when it plays out on the ground.
The NDB was created at the 2014 BRICS Fortaleza summit as a direct answer to years of frustration with the IMF and World Bank, whose voting structures concentrate power among the wealthiest shareholders. NDB’s five founders – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – took the opposite approach: equal shareholding, equal votes, no vetoes. It was meant to prove that a development bank built by and for the Global South could be structurally fairer than the one it was answering to.
Eleven years and roughly $43 billion in approved lending later, the critique that has followed the bank has little to do with its voting structure and everything to do with financing priorities and project impacts. Instead of applying its own consistent environmental and social standards – the way the World Bank does – NDB relies on borrower countries’ own systems to handle environmental, social and procurement oversight, without specifying in detail what those systems need to meet.
That approach assumes every member government already has adequate protections in place. It’s compounded by non-disclosure agreements between NDB and client governments, and by an information disclosure policy that has been labeled “interim” since 2016 – nearly a decade with no permanent version in sight.
The scorecards back this up. The 2025 DFI Transparency Index, run by the watchdog group Publish What You Fund, gave NDB just 50% on environmental and social disclosure and a flat zero on every measure tied to independent accountability – because no independent accountability mechanism exists. More than a decade in, there is still no formal channel through which community harmed by a project can lodge a complaint directly with the bank.
The two projects from India, in Manipur and Rajasthan, highlight the impacts the projects financed by NDB have had a how the policy failure has worsened the situation of the communities and environment.
Manipur wetland project
In Manipur’s Imphal valley, the Lamphelpat Waterbody Rejuvenation Project was announced as a Rs 665 crore effort to restore an ecologically significant wetland. What’s happened instead, is close to the opposite – and it illustrates the country-systems critique almost exactly.
Lamphelpat carries official recognition as a wetland from Manipur’s own State Wetlands Authority; the name says as much, since “pat” is the Meitei word for wetland. But NDB’s own project documents describe the site only as a “water body” – a term with no legal protection under Indian law. That reclassification let the project bypass the Wetlands Authority entirely; implementation instead fell to the state’s Water Resources Department and the project’s summary documents never mention wetlands at all.
This is precisely the failure mode critics have pointed to for years: when a bank hands oversight to “country systems” without specifying minimum standards, a state government can simply rename a protected wetland out of its own protections, and the bank’s safeguards have nothing to catch it.
The consequences are visible on the ground. Lamphelpat was the largest free-ranging refuge for the Manipuri pony, an endangered breed found nowhere else. Crews digging a 12-foot-deep artificial reservoir have left mud pools behind, and multiple reports describe ponies falling into them and dying.
This year has also brought a heavy water hyacinth bloom across the site, choking fish and raising flood risk. NDB rates the project “Category B” – moderate risk – this is hard to justify given the ecological stakes. And consistent with the bank’s broader disclosure critique, there is no detailed project report publicly available beyond a brief summary, and researchers say repeated requests for more information through NDB’s own channels went unanswered.
Rajasthan canal rehabilitation project
In Rajasthan, the $495-million rehabilitation of the Indira Gandhi Canal was approved by NDB in 2017, to fix nearly 1,000 kilometers of a system that is the backbone of water supply across the Thar Desert. For relining, the canal requires shutting it off, and shutting it off cuts water to the farms and households that depend on it daily.
Since 2020, the Water Resources Department has carried out roughly two-month closures each spring to get the work done. In 2024, that pattern broke – with national elections underway and ten north-western districts facing drinking water shortages, the state government canceled the planned shutdown. It pushed the project’s revised February 2025 deadline.
This reflects apathy in how projects are designed, the lack of proper assessments and risk evaluation and put paid to the assumption that extended closures can happen smoothly, especially when a real plan has not been designed to address the water security needs of a region and election-year politics.
In February 2025, farmers in Rajasthan’s Bikaner division blocked highways demanding fuller releases, echoing near-identical complaints from Jaisalmer farmers in 2023 over water allegedly diverted to other districts. The entire justification for NDB’s financing was a more reliable canal, and reliability is exactly what was missing.
NDB’s capacity-building components train water users’ associations on technical matters, but the public record offers no evidence that farmers had any real say in when closures would happen or how water would be allocated during rehabilitation – participation that is limited to training after the fact isn’t meaningful engagement.
NDB has classified the project as low-risk “Category B,” a rating built around construction hazards like desilting and relining. This reflects the same narrow definition of social risk flagged across NDB’s portfolio – one that equates harm with physical displacement and land acquisition, while overlooking that losing reliable water access can be just as disruptive to a livelihood.
The government’s own 2024 decision to cancel a shutdown rather than risk a drinking-water crisis is itself an admission that this risk is real; it simply never triggered the transparent public discussion the situation called for.
Neither Lamphelpat nor the Indira Gandhi Canal were isolated failures. Both are offered as illustrations of a single structural weakness that runs through NDB’s broader portfolio – the same pattern visible in the bank’s financing of Brazil’s Araripe III wind complex, where a local community was never consulted as a group, and South Africa’s Medupi coal plant, where “green” financing freed up room for continued coal lending elsewhere.
In each case, a bank built on the promise of equal power among its members has yet to extend that same principle to the people living beside the projects it funds – and until it does, the gap between NDB’s founding rhetoric and its operating reality will keep highlighting its failures.
The New Delhi Declaration: a missed opportunity
On September 12, 2026, BRICS leaders adopted the New Delhi Declaration, in which they described NDB as entering “its second golden decade of high-quality development” and pledged support for the bank as “a robust and strategic agent of development and modernisation” across the Global South.
The declaration praised NDB’s growing role in meeting the infrastructure needs of emerging economies, encouraged the bank to expand its capacity to mobilise resources and diversify funding, and backed the further expansion of NDB’s membership – all without a single reference to the accountability gaps researchers have spent a decade documenting.
The declaration does gesture toward governance, urging NDB to follow “the member-led and demand-driven principle” and to keep “strengthening its governance framework” so it can operate “in a fair and non-discriminatory manner.”
Nothing in the declaration recognises the need for accountability, improving policies or recognising the need for independent accountability mechanism, even as it welcomes the launch of a new BRICS-NDB Knowledge Portal meant to showcase “development experiences, best practices, policy innovations and lessons” from NDB-financed projects across the bloc.
The bank’s shareholder governments are asking it to grow faster, mobilize more capital, and take on more members – while the accountability infrastructure that would let affected communities be heard remains, by the bank’s own admission, still a work in progress. Until that changes, the gap between NDB’s founding rhetoric and its operating reality will keep expanding and communities will continue to be at the periphery of the “development and modernisation” that the bank is funding.
Anuradha Munshi is an independent financial accountability researcher and consultant with CFA.
This article went live on September twenty-first, two thousand twenty six, at nineteen minutes past six in the evening.
