Takshashila at the CivilBRICS 2015 Summit in Moscow

The Russian Federation in its year of BRICS presidency instituted a new political process called CivilBRICS. As part of this process, civil society representatives from the BRICS states were divided into seven working groups on social issues critical to the member-states such as healthcare, education, culture, development, urban problems, finance, conflicts settlement, and peace & security.The members of the working group met at the Civil BRICS Summit in Moscow on June29-July1 2015. After intense discussions, recommendations prepared by the working groups were presented to the official BRICS countries' representatives.Takshashila's Sarah Farooqui and Pranay Kotasthane were part of the Indian delegation that attended the Moscow Summit.Sarah Farooqui was in the Healthcare working group. She participated in a panel discussion on "Role of civil societies of BRICS countries in prevention of socially significant diseases". She spoke on the topic "Disease prevention and promotion of healthy lifestyles among youth from BRICS countries". Sarah spoke on the rise and effects of non-communicable diseases. She proposed a three-pronged approach to tackling sanitation in India.Pranay Kotasthane was in the 'Education and Science' working group. Pranay highlighted the need for networked learning across BRICS countries. He also spoke about having cultivation of scientific temper as one of the objectives for school curricula of all BRICS states.Pranay participated in an open discussion on "Money as a weapon". He presented how money has interacted with geopolitics in the post World War 2 era. Read his views on the significance of BRICS to India here. Earlier, Pranay had also co-authored a paper on "ICT Governance on the BRICS Agenda".