New Delhi: A US panel on religious freedom has placed India on its watchlist of countries where such freedom is at risk, noting that there has been a "disturbing increase" in violence against minorities in the South Asian country.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent congressionally mandated panel that provides recommendations to the government, said in a statement on Wednesday that India's response to attacks on Christians in the eastern state of Orissa in 2008 and against Muslims in western Gujarat state in 2002 was "largely inadequate".

The panel had recommended that India be placed on the more serious "countries of particular concern" list after the 2002 riots, but it was removed in 2005.

In Orissa's Kandhamal district, widespread trouble began in late August last year after the killing of Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati, a hardline Hindu leader who advocated that Christian converts return to Hinduism.

Police blamed local Maoist guerrillas for the killing, but Hindus quickly turned on local Christians and the rampages left at least 40 people dead, thousands homeless and a dozen churches destroyed.

In Gujarat about 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed when Hindu mobs rampaged through Muslim neighbourhoods, towns and villages in the state from February to April 2002.