Mumbai: India and Japan have offered to join a financial bailout plan led by the International Monetary Fund to rescue countries struck by the global credit crisis, Japan's Nikkei newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Both Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and his Japanese counterpart Taro Aso said their countries stood ready to cooperate in an International Monetary Fund loan scheme.

The Japanese offer came at the Group of Seven finance leaders' meeting in Washington early this month, where it offered part of its $1 trillion foreign exchange reserves to the IMF for supporting countries facing economic crises.

Manmohan Singh told a press conference with Japanese media on Monday that India too, with foreign exchange reserves of roughly $300 billion, would be happy to accept any request for cooperation in expanding the IMF's emergency lending scheme, the Nikkei said.

Addressing delegates at a luncheon organised by the Japan-India Business Cooperation Committee and the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Manmohan Singh called for a coordinated response to the current recessionary trends.

''The need of hour is to prevent the liquidity crisis from further shattering the confidence of investors, Singh said.

''We have to prevent liquidity crisis from becoming the crisis of confidence in the international monetary and financial system. The governments and central banks of the major economies have taken strong and innovative steps to deal with crisis. The global nature of the crisis calls for a coordinated global response,'' he added.

He said developing countries too are affected by the slowdown and they should play a key role in resolving the crisis.

''Developing countries like India are also affected by the crisis and had to be a part of the solution. We cannot afford to risk the gains we have made in the last few years. Nor do we wish to remain vulnerable to infirmities in international surveillance, supervision and regulatory mechanisms in the future,'' he said.