ISLAMABAD A high-level Indian delegation attended a regional meeting on poverty alleviation in the Pakistan capital on Monday, but officials said there were no plans for bilateral talks between the nuclear-armed neighbors.

India and Pakistan have massed around a million troops on their border in a tense military stand-off since a December attack on India's Parliament which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-backed militants.

Control of the Muslim-majority Himalayan region of Kashmir remains a central bone of contention between the two countries and was the spark for two of their three wars since independence in 1947.

The Indian team was led by Krishnan Chander Pant who is the Indian government's pointman on peace talks with a range of groups in Kashmir. He is also deputy chairman of India's Planning Commission, a key economic policy-setting body.

But a Pakistani Finance Ministry official said there were no plans for pant to hold bilateral talks with Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz or other government officials on the sidelines of the meeting, the Reuters reported.

Pakistan's Military ruler Pervez Musharraf opened the seven-nation South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) meeting of finance and planning ministers appealing for a renewed effort to fight poverty in the region.

"Our common story is that of missed opportunity," he said.

Some 520 million of South Asia's 1.3 billion people live on less than a dollar a day, and the region is home to almost half the world's poor.

Half South Asia's people are also illiterate while 10 million suffer from "avoidable disabilities" because of poor healthcare.

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Musharraf appealed for international help in "human resource development" but said it would help even more if the west would open its markets to products from the third world.

"That would lift tens of millions of our people out of the poverty trap," he said.

Musharraf also asked for international help in tracking down and returning billions of dollars stolen by corrupt officials which he said now resided in Western bank accounts.

"This is the blood of people in poor countries," he said. "If this capital is brought back, we'd be out of our debt problems."