India has recently signed to become a founding member of New Development Bank (NDB) and also the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). How will the role of the two Banks be different? Discuss the strategic significance of these two Banks for India.

For the NDB half of the answer, cover its origin, India's role and its significance as a reform-minded alternative source of development finance.

• The New Development Bank was proposed by India at the 2012 New Delhi summit and agreed at Fortaleza in 2014 alongside the Contingent Reserve Arrangement.
• The NDB is headquartered in Shanghai, its first president was K.V. Kamath of India, and India is a major borrower from it.
• The op-ed cites the NDB as BRICS's main concrete reform result, in line with its founding idea of reforming bodies such as the IMF and World Bank.

Cite current figures on the NDB's scale, India's borrowing, local-currency financing and constraints, set against the larger AIIB, to show how the banks differ and matter to India.

• The NDB, agreed at Fortaleza in July 2014 and headquartered in Shanghai, has five founders with equal shares and ten members; the AIIB, by contrast, has 111 members.
• NDB lists 139 approved projects worth about $42.9 billion; an op-ed says only about $20 billion is disbursed, slower than the AIIB, and India has received close to $10 billion across 32 projects.
• Indian projects include metro rail systems and the Delhi-Ghaziabad-Meerut RRTS; the NDB aims for 30% local-currency lending and priced a 7 billion yuan Panda bond on 8 September 2026.