Russia and India are in talks over future purchases of Russia’s Sukhoi Superjet 100 airliner, Deputy Industry and Trade Minister Aleksandr Potapov told Russian media in New Delhi in the wake of last week’s session of the Russian-Indian working group for modernization and industrial cooperation.

"Russia and India are conducting proactive negotiations with a number of Indian air carriers over marketing Russia’s Sukhoi Superjet 100 airliner. Also in progress are consultations with India’s aviation authorities regarding the validation of SSJ 100 certificates," he said.

The absence of a firm contract with India is the main obstacle to validation, he added.

"At the same time we believe that this is a very promising area of cooperation and we agreed with the Indian partner to push ahead with the work in the same direction," Potapov said.

Production of India’s own regional plane may become an important joint project in civil aircraft building, he added.

The KPMG consultancy in the middle of last April published a report saying that India by 2020 will not only rise to the position of the world’s third largest aircraft market after the United States and India but also get ahead of them to rise to first place by 2030. Experts attribute the potential for such considerable increase to population growth prospects, air traffic’s growing popularity (at the moment no more than 0.5% of India’s population use air carriers’ services) and lower jet fuel prices.