Decrying those citing the current global financial crisis to demand India go slow on its economic reforms, Former UN Under Secretary-General Shashi Tharoor said more people had been pulled above the poverty line in the past 15 years compared to the preceding 45. Delivering the X Commemorative Lecture organised by the Fedbank Hormis Memorial Foundation here last night on 'The Global Financial Crisis and India's Incomplete Transformation,' Dr Tharoor said India's prosperity lay in integration with the global capital. Those who were pointing to the global financial crisis with ''unseemly glee,'' to pronounce the decline of capitalism, were forgetting that the energies unleashed by economic liberalisation in India had empowered the underclass in ways that 45 years of socialism talk could not. Comparing the days of the closed economy to the present scenario, Dr Tharoor recalled that people had to wait a lifetime to get a telephone connection then as against ten million new mobile phone connections being added every month now, with everyone from a toddy tapper to a fisherman to a farmer possessing one.

Asserting the fundamentals of the Indian economy were strong, thanks to robust domestic private entrepreneurial and managerial skills, Dr Tharoor said even indicators such as the sensex would resume their upward trend as FIIs would find India a more attractive place to invest than the US or Europe. While the Mumbai terror attacks would slow down the recovery process in India, a ''measured and focused'' response to the terror threat was the need of the hour rather than ''knee jerk'' military reprisals which could spiral out of control, he added. Describing India as a land of extremes, Dr Tharoor said the bottom 25 per cent of the people, who were living on as less as Rs 360 per month in the rural areas, should not be lost sight of. ''We cannot lose sight of the fact that 17,000 farmers committed suicide in India last year, the highest in the world. Economic growth should be a means to an end for the uplift of the weaker sections,'' he added.