TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) - Visiting Indian oil minister made new proposals Monday to nudge forward plans to build a $4 billion gas pipeline to take Iranian gas to India through Pakistan.

Spelling out his new proposal, the Indian Oil Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar told CNN that he suggested Iran and India negotiate the terms and conditions for delivery of gas at a point on the India-Pakistan border, while the issue of security of the pipeline and its uninterrupted operation could be a bilateral matter between Iran and Pakistan.

"These two agreements would become back-to-back but independent of each other with different partners, and that might be the way forward," he said.

Pakistan has repeatedly assured both Iran and India that it will not interfere in the smooth delivery of gas to India. But decades of mistrust between India and Pakistan over the issue of Kashmir has kept the pipeline issue in its early stages.

Earlier, Aiyar told an international oil and gas conference here that India would need huge amounts of gas over the next 20 years as its economy is expected to grow by 7 or 8 percent per year.

"Iran could become the single most important supplier of gas to India," he said.

The Iranian side is considering the proposal.

"Our first reaction is that we have no problems with this but we have to study it carefully and discuss it with Pakistan," Iran's Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh told CNN.

Another problem has been the likely pressure from the United States, which has imposed fines on any significant outside investment in Iran's oil and gas industry as part of the wider sanctions against Tehran. For years the U.S. has also blocked all oil pipeline plans from Central Asia to the Persian Gulf through Iran.

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Zanganeh said he did not expect problems from Washington.

"This is not American gas and neither the seller nor the buyer are American... in Central Asia, the U.S. imposed sanctions on American oil going through Iran," he said.

Another proposal on the table is for a consortium of the Russian state-owned gas company Gazprom and the Italian ENI to lay deep-water pipeline skirting southern Pakistan -- a pipeline which would be less vulnerable.