TECHNOLOGY POLICY 61 In the initial two decades, industrial development in India was largely due to imported know-how through foreign collaboration agreements which ran to about 5,200 upto 1977. The impact of indigenous R & D was minimal. Now India is consciously falling in line with the new pattern of international division of labour emerging from the nature of operations of the multinational corporations. The MNC's control the technology, the marketing channels, know-how and other more difficult steps in the production process. Sometimes, they subcontract component parts or processes to firms in developing countries. But often they prefer production in wholly-owned subsidiaries. Besides, MNC's dominate the export trade in technology. In the initial stages of product cycle, the MNC's invariably prefer to control production via subsidiaries. Normally, no licence is given for initial stages of product cycle. What is licensed is generally outdated technology by Western standards. The export-led strategy of India is envisaged within this design of international division of labour. As the UNIDO report of 1979 points out, "it is in the long run interest of the industrialised countries that the international division of labour should continue to develop along the lines established during the past decade. Continuous growth of labour-intensive and raw-material intensive industries in the developing countries, increased redeployment of capital intensive production in the last stages of the product cycle to developing countries, maintenance of capital intensive sectors in the early product cycle in the industrialised countries, and maintenance and expansion of skill-intensive industry, namely, industry requiring a more sophisticated services sector, expensive R&D facilities and a better educated labour force in the industrialised countries." It so happens that the later or mature stage of the product cycle is characterized by low-value added components, low rates of profit, a buyers' market and established technology. Therefore, one of the requirements of the international division of labour would be that technologies needed to manufacture the goods in the last stages of the product cycle would have to be imported by the developing countries from the industrialized countries. But such an approach is but a mere continuation of the past experience of the developing countries in which it could be said that they have been basically exporters of commodities and importers of technologies of older vintage which have already spent their useful life in developed countries. The reasons why developed countries participate in technology transfer are: (a) to extend the life cycle of technologies; (d) to shift or share the cost of R & D; (c) to penetrate closed markets; and (d) to cope with an increasing international technology market. The Indian policy in respect of imported technology is consciously or otherwise in consonance with the emerging pattern of