Senior corporate and political leaders have urged Australian business to look beyond the traditional resources trade to build a long-term relationship with India - now the world's fastest growing large economy - or risk losing ground to more strategically focused companies from other countries.
Ellerston Capital chairman Ashok Jacob said that defence and education would be the real medium-term foundations of the bilateral relationship Australia is trying to build through a trade and investment agreement. 
And NSW trade minister Stuart Ayres said Australia had to accept that countries like India and China were curbing fossil fuel use due to public concern about pollution and companies should be looking for new long-term opportunities that would arise from these changes.
Despite coming from a major coal exporting state, Mr Ayres said he could not see coal prices recovering. "It will only be a matter of time until people in India seek a better environment. So for a trade minister looking to the long term, I'm doing what rational business person would do and looking to diversify our product offering," he said in an interview.
They were speaking at the Engaging with India Forum in Sydney jointly sponsored by The Australian Financial Review and the Australia India Business Council where India's High Commissioner Navdeep Suri, warned many Australian businesses are "a bit behind the curve" in engaging with India and "might have catching up to do" compared to some other nations.
While the Commonwealth government has been "pushing pretty hard" for some years to forge closer ties with India, Mr Suri asked "has business been a bit slower as compared to government?"
He also said there was a perception in India that other western competitors have come with "better offerings" than Australia. "The time for increasing the tempo of that engagement [with India] is now," he said.
Linfox founder Lindsay Fox, who has built a transport business in India, said that he had run up against entrenched traditional practices which meant that Australian companies had to understand the local culture if they were to be successful.
But he also underlined the power of educational exports in laying the foundations for other bilateral business saying: "The best way is to educate Indians and let them go home after a period of time."
Mr Jacob, who also chairs the Australia India Council, said it was hard to find a better long-term investment opportunity in the world than India with its likelihood of long-term economic growth of at least six per cent a year but he warned that the business environment was different to China.
Pointing out that there were about 20 times as many applications for Australian special investor visas from China than India, he said: "When you have made $5 million in India you don't feel the need to get it out of there."
And Mr Jacob said that while there was a big emerging food export opportunity to India, Australian exporters had to understand that Indian people still trusted the integrity of their own domestic food supply chains unlike people in China who were desperate to get their hands on quality Australian food products.
Arguing that Australia could find markets for the hard commodities it exported to India in other places including China, he said: "The two platforms for the next [few] years will be defence and education."
Speaking in an interview after the conference Mr Jacob said Australia's growing defence ties had given it a much greater level of engagement with the top levels of the Indian government than the negotiations on the Closer Economic Cooperation Agreement launched by Prime Ministers Tony Abbott and Narendra Modi in 2014.
"Australia has discovered that it has access at the highest levels, ten times more than when you are trying to do something with the FTA, where in India they they don't even want to be with you. It has given Australia a phenomenal platform which we might be able to take somewhere."
But Mr Jacob questioned whether Australian education institutions were "acting like scalpers" by aiming their products at a lower level of Indian students to generate volume when they should be taking on the elite universities in the US and Britain which attracted the top students who would be great leaders in the future.
What they said
"This is an India that is young, restless, aspirational, impatient and hungry for change. They are not going to give the politicians the luxury to postpone urgent decisions."
- Indian High Commissioner Navdeep Suri
"Australia has discovered that it has access at the highest levels, ten times more than when you are trying to do something with the FTA, where in India they don't even want to be with you. It has given Australia a phenomenal platform which we might be able to take somewhere."
- Ellerston Capital chairman Ashok Jacob
"You're already seeing a strong shift to renewable energy across Indian policy settings and Australia needs to make sure we move with that. We'll continue to be a strong exporter of mineral and resources but the capacity to diversify away from that will become increasingly important."
- NSW Trade Minister Stuart Ayres
"If we both put the focus to it (an Indian trade deal) now we are literally two months away from a deal."
- Former trade minister Andrew Robb
"We've had a $US50 billion windfall from falling oil prices which has really helped the balance sheet a lot," - Indian high commissioner Navdeep Suri
"Australian businesses are wasting a lot of time jumping on a plane and trying to do it themselves. The Indian opportunity is like Mt Everest, you can't climb it without a Sherpa."
- Pitcher Partners Cross-Border Business consultant Rohini Kappadath.