By Y.P. Rajesh

NEW DELHI, Oct 30 (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged India, one of the world's biggest polluters, to do more to combat climate change on Tuesday, saying her country was willing to help New Delhi make progress.

Merkel, a former environment minister who has pushed global warming to the top of her international agenda, said rich nations and emerging economies needed to strike a balance over the amount of responsibility they need to shoulder to prevent climate change and not fight over it.

"We have to prove that we are willing to strike a balance," Merkel, who began a four-day visit to India on Monday, told business leaders in New Delhi. "Multilateral agreements are of the essence."

Germany could help India become a more efficient user of energy by sharing technology to avoid "mistakes we made in the industrial countries", she said, speaking through a translator.

"Climate change, beyond the substantive issue that it is, is a very good issue for us to learn to shoulder common responsibilities," she said, referring to growing trade and business ties between the two countries.

Emerging economies like China and India, also major polluters, are opposed to strict, new environmental regulations or energy constraints as they fear such steps could strangle their economic growth.

They demand that industrialised nations, traditionally the chief polluters, bear the brunt of emission cuts.

Scientists say climate change is expected to have a serious impact in South Asia as the region depends on monsoon rains and Himalayan glacier-fed rivers, and has a long coastline.

"LIFT INVESTMENT CAPS"

Receding glaciers could jeopardise water supplies for hundreds of millions of people and rising sea levels could menace cities like Mumbai and Kolkata, as well as neighbouring Bangladesh, experts warn.

New Delhi is expected to come out with a national plan to tackle global warming by the end of this year and Indian experts say that the country has already achieved substantial energy efficiency.

Merkel's visit to India, her first as chancellor, is largely aimed at boosting business ties between the two countries, whose trade touched about 10.5 billion euros ($15 billion) four years ahead of an official target.

India, Asia's third-biggest economy, has grown at an average of 8.6 percent in the last four years and is expected to maintain a similar rate in the coming years.

However, it needs huge investments in its infrastructure sector and German businessmen travelling with Merkel said New Delhi needed to lift caps set on foreign investment in insurance, banking, retail and telecommunications sectors.

This could push Germany up from its ranking as the sixth largest foreign investor in India, they said, as relations between the two countries blossom after having briefly cooled following India's nuclear tests in 1998.

"We believe that the potential of Indo-German cooperation has not yet been fully tapped," said Merkel, who holds talks with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh later on Tuesday.

"We stand ready to build roads, rail tracks, invest in the financial sector, insurance, banking sector," she said.

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