``We no longer discuss the future of India: we say `the future is India,''' said Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath at the conference organized by the US-India Business Council.

In 30 years, he predicted, India would ``certainly have achieved'' 100 percent literacy, become a developed country, enjoy the same fundamentals as the United States, and should have resolved the thorny Kashmir problem with Pakistan.

The one-day conference assessed the US-India relationship over the past three decades and debated what the next 30 years could hold for the partnership between the world's most populous and oldest democracies.

Nath cited India's potential as a key global foreign investor, saying Indian investments in Britain have already exceeded British investments in India. And Indian investments in Australia have also outstripped Australian investment in India.

``Even with China, with whom our trade a decade ago was just a billion dollars a year, it is now more than a billion dollars a month,'' he said.

By 2035, ``I am confident that we would have provided a standard of living for our people comparable at least to what developed countries enjoy today,'' a buoyant Nath told his audience of largely American and Indian business leaders.

He said he would not like to compare India with China as comparisons were always ``invidious,'' but then quoted an executive of a Japanese multinational corporation as telling him during a recent Tokyo visit that Japanese investments in China had slowed down.

He quoted the Japanese executive as saying that ``it's very easy to get into China, but we find it difficult to stay there; and it is very difficult to get into India but very easy to stay there.''

Henry Kissinger, the influential ex-US secretary of state, said India, with its nuclear arsenal and immense human resource potential, ``will emerge as a great power'' but was unlikely to be part of any US design to become a counterweight to China.

``India will be concerned with its own security and independence and it will make its judgment on that basis,'' he said.

He added, ``I'm known in the United States as a strong advocate and one of the originators of close relations with China. I believe that today. I am also a strong advocate of close relations with India.''

But Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said that preserving a stable balance of power in Asia through strong states on China's periphery constituted ``a critical US security interest'' given China's increasing power.

Japan and India, who are both vying for permanent seats in the UN Security Council, will hedge against growing Chinese capabilities, he said, and ``supporting them in this regard makes sense because it coheres with the global objectives of the United States.''

Raghuram Rajan, head of research at the International Monetary Fund, said India's emergence as a global power would depend on its capability of creating jobs for its youth - a quarter of the population is below the age of 25 - and overcoming weak infrastructure and growing disparities.AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE