Heading the G20 and New Delhi’s choices

Context:

In about a time span of three months, India shall be assuming the year-long presidency of the G20. It is a platform entailed with the responsibility of shaping decision-making on key challenges facing the world today.

Importance and Complexities:

• The G20 membership represents nearly 90% of the world’s GDP. It is an advisory body, not a treaty-based forum and, therefore, its decisions are recommendations to its own members
• It has representation from institutions like the United Nations, the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and WHO, which makes G20 an incomparable body. It has played a key role in addressing financial and economic challenges such as the global financial crisis of 2008-09 and the Eurozone crisis of 2010.
• In the past G20, has faced an existential crisis, when the major powers have fallen out. The disastrous impact of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the war in Ukraine, India-China border tensions, and EU/U.S.-Russia hostility has negatively the G20 grouping. It makes the task of the presidency country much more complicated