MULTINATIONALS AND SELF-RELIANCE 35 63 Lobbies of drug MNCs like OPPI justify the centralization of R and D in the home country on the specious plea that "disease knows no national boundaries". Yet, some tropical diseases are unknown in the West, on which therefore little R and D is carried out. The availability of only one drug for treatment of leprosy and filaria from which millions suffer in India, is obviously an outcome of this tendency. 64 Sudip Chaudhuri, "The Role of the Foreign Controlled Firms vis-avis the Indigenous Firms in the Pharmaceutical Industry in India", paper read at the Drugs Seminar, mimeo. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Chaudhuri provides several other examples. 68 This is based on an unpublished Corporate Studies Group study. 69 Reply by the Minister of State for Petroleum, Chemicals and Fertilizers to unstarred question no 1620, Rajya Sabha, 9 March 1981. S K Goyal, in a survey of excess capacity with the Indian corporate sector has found that^the largest number of cases, and particularly those having more than 25 per cent excess installed capacity, are of Multinational Corporations". See SK Goyal, "A Preliminary Survey of Excess Industrial Capacities with the Indian Corporate Sector", Corporate Studies Group, Reprint No 6, Indian Institute of Public Administration, July 1980. 70 Majumdar, "Instruments of Policy", op cit. 71 Goyal, "The Impact of Foreign Subsidiaries on India's Balance of Payments", study prepared for the Joint CTC-ESCAP Unit, Bangkok, 1975, mimeo. 72 K K Subrahmaniam and P Mohanan Pillai, Multinationals and Indian Export, New Delh , 1979, Chap III. 73 C Vaitsos, Inter'country Income Distribution and Transnational Enterprises, Oxford, 1974, Appendix 5. Sanjaya Lall. The Multinational Corporations, London,1980. 74 J. Majumdar, Multinationals in Drugs & Pharmaceutical Industry in India, Calcutta, 1979, p. 44. 75 Answer to Question No 6163, Lok Sabha, 15 April 1975. 76 Minister of Petroleum, Chemicals and Fertilizers in reply to unstarred Question No 365, Lok Sabha, 2 November 1978. 77 CP Chandrasekhar and Prabir Purkayastha, "Transfer Pricing in the Indian Drug Industry", Social Scientist, Vol, 10, No 1, January 1982. 78 Nagesh Kumar, "Evaluation of Direct Foreign Investment, op cit. Chap 5. 79 B B Roy, factory manager's notification cited in Majumdar, "Instruments of Policy", op cit, 80 Economic Times (New Delhi), 24 November 1981. 81 A sharp, and even somewhat biased, critique of the role of the public sector drug companies is given in Subrata Sinha, "Drug Prices and the Public Sector", paper read at the Drugs Seminar, mimeo. 82 The confidential IMF documents on India's loan were published in abridged form in N Ram's dispatches in the Hindu, 17-21 October 1981. See also the white paper published by the Government of West Bengal on the IMF loan.