Speaking at a press conference with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Blair said Britain not only backed its bid for a permanent Security Council seat but increased Indian cooperation at the international level.

"Yes, on both points," Blair told reporters at 10 Downing Street.

"India is a country of 1.2 billion people. For India not to be represented on the Security Council is I think something that is not in tune with the modern times in which we live," Blair said.

After emerging from about 45 minutes of talks with Blair, Singh said he was glad with Blair's reaffirmation of Britain's "resolve to help India gain permanent membership of the Security Council."

Singh, whose left-leaning government took office in May, was on his way to New York where he will address the UN General Assembly and lobby for a permanent seat for India.

Brazil, Germany and Japan are also pressing to join the current five veto-wielding members of the Security Council and press reports have said the four candidates are supporting one another's bids.

When Britain assumes the chairmanship of the G-8 group of leading industrial countries next year, Blair added that he hoped "we can involve India and indeed China too in dialogue on important issues.

"There's no point, for example, on us having a dialogue on an issue like climate change, which is going to have an impact over the next few decades, without involving the Indian economy and the Chinese economy in that debate," Blair said.

In his opening remarks, Blair said he had "indicated to the prime minister (Singh) that our priorities (for the G8) would be around the question of Africa and climate change.

"And I hope very much we can find way of involving India in that dialogue at that level, too," he added.

In New York, Singh, on his first trip outside Asia, will also hold his first meetings with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and US President George W. Bush.

The premier told reporters before leaving India that his meeting with Musharraf "will be a further step in the ongoing dialogue process with Pakistan".

The rival neighbours have been trying cautiously to repair relations in a peace drive initiated last year by Singh's predecessor Atal Behari Vajpayee, whose Hindu nationalists lost elections a year later.

Singh, an Oxford-educated economist who recalled seeing Downing Street from the outside as a student, launched India's liberalisation drive as finance minister in 1991.

But he rules as premier with the support of communists openly critical of his free-market proposals.

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