With India holding the presidency of the group for this year, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi is chairing the G20 Summit.

 

Scale

Significant groundwork has been carried out in the months leading up to the 2-day event, which included an incredible 220+ G-20 meetings comprising 17 minister-level discussions across portfolios such as trade, foreign affairs, and finance, encompassing views from over 60 countries.

 

The summit is currently playing host to 43 world leaders and is being attended by 25,000+ delegates from 115 countries.

 

In terms of policy and research, India’s G20 presidency has released 112 outcome documents, reportedly two to five times the output of previous presidencies.

 

Dr. Muqtedar Khan, Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware, added ,

 

… (In my view), already you can say that India’s G20 summit has been a success…this will go down in history as a successful G summit.

 

Given the wide-ranging efforts of organizers, the summit has been unprecedented in its diversity, consultation, and delivery.

 

Consensus on the Delhi Declaration

One of the major concerns heading into the G20 was the fear that the summit may not yield a collective consensus statement supported by all participating countries.

 

Anxieties of a potential deadlock were heightened by the fact that none of the earlier G20 summits have failed to produce a unanimously supported declaration.

 

As expected, the key point of discord was the issue of Ukraine with the EU resisting the proposed language as being too soft on Russia.

 

On the other hand, any attempt to strengthen the language, would likely not have been acceptable to the Kremlin and perhaps the Chinese government as well.

 

However, intensive negotiations by ‘sherpas’, the personal representatives of the heads of state, finally bore fruit.

 

All parties were able to achieve a consensus on Day 1 of the summit and issued a joint 34-page declaration – G20 New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration (‘the Delhi Declaration’).

 

The Delhi Declaration made no mention of Russian aggression, as was the case in last year’s Bali Summit, but instead noted ,