The stress laid by Dr. A.J.P. Abdul Kalam on giving a major thrust to technology development, in the course of his address to students of the students of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, provides an occasion for taking a fresh look at issues on which views may still remain as they were when they were formulated decades ago. Before doing so, it should be mentioned that the policy enunciated by the Government in 1993 has specified a number of technologies including those for alternative fuels, renewable and no-conventional sources and energy conservation. This long and forward-looking list would absorb the attention of large teams of scientists for a long time. The placing of the emphasis on self-reliance in technology in the earlier years of independence had been unavoidable for quite a few reasons. None of the developed countries, principally the United States, was willing to agree to a comprehensive transfer of technology to India which had, therefore, to depend on its own capabilities to prise it open from whatever was available as intermediate or finished products. India getting down to this task of cracking case-hardened technology did enrich knowledge and helped utilize it for subsequent indigensation though it was often very much like re-inventing the wheel. The Western reluctance to part with technology to India during the years of the Cold War let it with no choice but to turn to the erstwhile Soviet Union for technology over a wide range. This did give a fillip to the building of scientific and engineering skills in India though it is doubtful whether technology transfer was complete in all cases. Apart from this, what India could hardly be claimed as state-of the art since the Soviet Union itself was still very much behind the U.S. and Western Europe. Such a scene relating to technology transfer and development in India should be instructive for rational policy formulation. R & D Scientists and engineers in both the public and private sectors are often understandably excited over their achievements in adaptations of imported technology and the resulting expansion of operations on the shop-floor well beyond the range of the agreements with the foreign collaborator. This wouldn’t have been possible without the exacting reverse engineering required in many cases. But one cannot regard these as breakthroughs. Breakthroughs materialize only if and when the handling of the technology which has been so far pressed into service advances it qualitatively to differentiate the end-product from the earlier batches for expanding its capabilities and performance. The record of the Indian scientists and engineers in many areas is no doubt impressive. The designing and development of the supersonic Light Combat Aircraft could certainly be in illustration of scientific creativity. It is doubtful whether the Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) could obtain substantial support from abroad for embedding carbon fibre composites in the wings of the aircraft and for the reduction of its weight though this has taken a very long time. The lesion from such performances may well be that the crossing of the knowledge barriers by determined scientists and engineers could progressively demystify hi-tech to enroll them as members of the international scientific fraternity by and large does not suffer from hang-ups over the sharing of knowledge and could ignore the restrictions imposed by official policy. The climate should hopefully continue to be so congenial to Indian scientists within the country and abroad.