Prime Minister Stephen Harper arrived in Mumbai on Sunday, beginning a three-day tour of India.

Harper is scheduled to stop in New Delhi and Amristar, as well as Mumbai, during the trip. The visit is Harper's first to India as prime minister.

During his first day there, he was scheduled to meet with Indian investors in Canada and visit a Jewish centre in Mumbai that was attacked by terrorists last year.

Harper was also expected to have his photo taken with Bollywood star Akshay Kumar, and deliver a speech on Canada's relationship with the country.

The prime minister has been criticized for being late to reach out to the growing Asian giant, which houses some 1.2 billion people.

Harper refutes that claim.

"This government is re-engaging India in a way that hasn't been done since the 1970s," he said.

The prime minister's visit follows the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit, which wrapped up in Singapore on Sunday morning.

There, Harper announced that the world's leading and emerging economies are "a long way" from a new treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and a new deal is unlikely to emerge from next month's climate-change conference in Copenhagen.

While the 21-nation group usually meets to discuss trade and other economic issues, climate change has dominated this weekend's meetings.

Harper was among a number of leaders to emerge from the breakfast to say they are a long way off from a new deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which will expire in 2012.

"(There was) a pretty strong consensus at the meeting this morning that countries of the world remain a long way from a binding, legal treaty on climate change," the prime minister said.

Harper pointed out that there are 3,000 "bracketed pieces of text" in the Copenhagen working document, which means there are thousands of issues that require further discussion.

"I don't think that can be attributed to any one country," he said. "There obviously are significant areas of disagreement."

At the close of the summit on Sunday, the leaders released a statement that abandoned the idea of specific emission-reduction targets or even "aspirational goals," the term once used by APEC leaders.

The communiqué only said that leaders had agreed to phase out "over the medium term" fossil fuel subsidies. No timeline accompanied that statement. In the end, the leaders promised they would work "towards an ambitious outcome in Copenhagen."

"We probably need to get our negotiators out of this morass of hundreds of pages and thousands of brackets of text and into looking at the big picture and coming to some agreement on some big picture items," Harper said.

Opposition critics in Canada told CTV's Question Period that the Harper government has not taken concrete steps to reduce emissions and stop climate change.

"Most other countries will come to Copenhagen with real plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to cut energy consumption in their countries," said Scott Brison, a Liberal MP from Nova Scotia.

"Mr. Harper's government is taking a wait-and-see approach and not doing anything in terms of specific actions to make a difference.

Deputy NDP leader and former Quebec environment minister Thomas Mulcair said that countries with less developed economies like China and India were temporarily exempted from Kyoto because they were given time to catch up economically while countries like Canada developed clean technologies.

"What is unreasonable... is that Stephen Harper is using this as an excuse to avoid internalizing into the cost of the tarsands oil, for example, internalizing the cost of the greenhouse gas emissions, and we're going to continue skewing our economy and it's a huge mistake for future generations," he said.

While at the summit, the prime minister engaged in a number of bilateral meetings and informal talks with APEC leaders over the weekend, including Russian President Dmitri Medvedev.

In early December Harper is scheduled to visit China for the first time, and South Korea.

With files from The Canadian Press