The flight from Dubai overshot the runway coming in to land near the southern city of Mangalore and plunged into a steep forested gorge, where it burst into flames.
Only eight passengers survived when the aircraft broke up and caught fire. Survivors have told of their escape amid scenes of horror and death, crawling or being carried from the burning remains.
Many of the victims were Indian workers returning from jobs in the Persian Gulf. Some had not seen their families for more than a year.
India's Directorate General of Civil Aviation is trying to determine the cause of the crash, which is the country's worst civil aviation disaster in 14 years.
India's aviation minister, Praful Patel, says he feels morally responsible and deeply saddened by the accident.
After returning to New Delhi from the crash site Mr Patel briefed the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, on the disaster.
Later he told reporters that as head of civil aviation he feels very saddened and a great sense of anguish, but declined to confirm reports that he had offered to resign.
"I have conveyed my deep sense of anguish to the prime minister," he said.
"I also feel personally morally responsible that such a sad and tragic incident has taken place."
Mr Patel says the pilot of the plane was "very experienced" and suggested a short runway overrun area could have contributed to the disaster.
He says chief pilot Z. Glusica - officially identified as a Serbian national - had logged more than 10,000 hours of flying time and was familiar with the table-top runway, having landed there nearly 20 times in the past.
While saying landing conditions had been fair with good visibility, he noted that the sanded safety area surrounding the runway in the event of an overshoot was shorter than at some airports.
"Mangalore does not have much of a spillover area [and] in this case apparently it had not been able to stop the plane," Mr Patel said.
"We can certainly say from preliminary findings that everything otherwise, except the touchdown and the stopping of the plane ... appeared to be normal."
But the minister stressed it was "too early" to determine the precise cause of the crash, saying an inquiry had been ordered into the incident and that efforts were being made to retrieve the plane's digital flight data recorder, or "black box".
A team from the aircraft manufacturer, Boeing, is being sent from the US to India to provide technical help to investigators probing the crash.
The chairman of the Indian Airports Authority, V.P. Agarwal, says the plane's flight crew had not reported any problem.
- ABC/BBC/Reuters/AFP