NEW DELHI (AFP) -- The foreign ministers of India and Pakistan agreed to meet in Islamabad early next year for "substantive talks" on the nuclear-armed rivals' peace process, the two officials said.

"We have agreed on the dates. I look forward to welcome him on the 13th of January in Islamabad," Pakistan's Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri said after an informal lunch with his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee.

Kasuri is currently in India on a private visit to attend a wedding of friends. "I thought it would be good to invite him for lunch," Mukherjee said on Friday.

"We will have substantive talks at that point of time (in January)," Mukherjee told reporters after the lunch. Kasuri also said that "after my meeting today I have greater hope" for the peace process, adding that the two had agreed that "India-Pakistan relations are important and we need to develop a level of trust."

The Indian minister also said Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf would be invited to New Delhi for a South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) conference in April 2007.

SAARC groups Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

The India-Pakistan peace process was put back on track after foreign secretary-level talks in New Delhi in mid-November, during which the two sides agreed to set up a new anti-terror panel.

India had put on hold the nearly three-year-old talks in the face of public outrage over July's deadly attacks on Mumbai's commuter network, which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan's spy agency and a Pakistan-based militant group.

Islamabad denied any involvement in the blasts, which killed 186 people.

But those talks, as expected, made no breakthroughs on key issues such as the future of the Himalayan region of Kashmir, the cause of two of the neighbors' three wars.

New Delhi accuses Islamabad of arming and training Islamic militants battling its rule in Muslim-majority Indian Kashmir and sponsoring attacks elsewhere in the country.

India and Pakistan each hold part of Kashmir and claim it in full.

*******Caption: Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri (left) and his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee in New Delhi.