Malcolm Turnbull has confirmed he will meet the founder of the Adani mining company, Gautam Adani, during his India visit, but would not be drawn on discussions about the company’s bid for almost $1bn in federal loans.

Energy policy has dominated discussion before Turnbull’s visit, in which is due to meet the prime minister, Narendra Modi.

It had been widely reported Turnbull would meet Adani, who was expected to lobby for his company’s bid for a $900m concessional loan from the North Australia Infrastructure Facility.

In a short appearance on Monday afternoon, Turnbull confirmed the meeting.

“As far as the rail link is concerned, if you’re asking about Adani’s interest in securing funding from the the North Australia Infrastructure [Facility], that’s an independent process. It has to go through that independent assessment by the board.”

The NAIF loan, drawn from a $5bn funding pool aimed at developing the north of Australia, would subsidise a rail link for Adani’s proposed Carmichael coalmine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.

Adani is believed to be up against the rail company Aurizon for the rail link loan, and has faced a number of legal challenges to its proposed $21bn Carmichael project. Amid that uncertainty Adani is deciding whether to go ahead.

Before arriving in India, Turnbull declined to say if he would be promoting the Carmichael project.

“We’ll certainly be talking about the importance of energy exports to India,” he said. “India has a massive program of expanding electrification across the country and Australian coal has a very big role to play in that.”

On Monday afternoon he said trade with India was going “very well”, but a free trade agreement was some time off.

In response to the meeting, GetUp accused Turnbull of “kissing the boots” of Gautam Adani, as reports revealed renewed fears for the Great Barrier Reef, which environmental groups fear will be affected by the nearby coal project.

“While Australia is reeling, our prime minister is … in India kissing the boots of Adani, a coal baron billionaire who wants to build the world’s biggest new coalmine,” said Sam Regester, GetUp’s environmental justice campaign director.

“Turnbull’s idea of protecting the reef is giving a coal billionaire a billion dollars to build a coalmine”.

Turnbull and Adani have met at least twice previously. After their meeting in 2015, Adani said he had lobbied for legislative action against environmental activism through the courts.

In August that year the Abbott government proposed amendments to the Environmental Protection and Diversity Act to stop environmental groups challenging projects unless they were “directly affected”, but they were defeated in the Senate.

The Greens have announced they will introduce a bill in the next sitting week of parliament to introduce a “suitable person test” to the NAIF funding process, intended to block the Adani project because of the company’s alleged track record of environmental law breaches.

Last week environmental legal groups asked the Productivity Commission to investigate Adani’s bid to the NAIF, claiming it potentially breached competitive neutrality principles because governments should not be investing such funds into the resources sector.