Despite the crisis in Chechnya, Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin prepared Wednesday to head for India as scheduled on a four-day state visit.


Chernomyrdin met with President Boris Yeltsin on Tuesday at Yeltsin's residence outside Moscow to discuss Chechnya. His spokesman, Vartan Ofsepian, said the conflict in the northern Caucasus would not derail the Indian trip.


The visit was to have begun Wednesday, but was delayed by a day because of the death of Chernomyrdin's brother. Ofsepian said the prime minister would fly to New Delhi late Wednesday or Thursday morning after attending the funeral in the town of Orenburg in the Ural Mountains.


On the eve of the trip, Chernomyrdin said trade with India was largely untapped because Indian businessmen have been slow to react to Russian reforms.


"As a result, many Indian firms are losing their positions on the Russian market to more aggressive and less cautious competitors," Itar-Tass quoted him as he answered written questions from Indian journalists.


Chernomyrdin is expected to sign an agreement on joint space projects and hold talks on co-operation of the two countries' defense industries.


He said the talks would concentrate on the military-technical field. Russian and Soviet-made weapons already account for 60-80 percent of India's armed forces materiel, according to the Interfax news agency.


Rather than buy more weapons, India would prefer to acquire the technology and equipment that would allow it to manufacture its own weapons, a diplomat with India's embassy in Moscow told Interfax.