Tirthankar Roy’s “The Economic Legacies of Colonial Rule in India: Another Look” (EPW, 11 April 2015) was expectedly stimulating and informative —but I would like to raise a couple of questions.

First, the role of expatriate technologists in the pre-independence and even the post-independence Indian industrial development, regardless of ownership or management, is certainly a subject of interest, as is the effort to develop Indian expertise. Given the detailed census figures for Europeans and their characteristics it should be possible to quantify it.