position(claimed by Joseph Needham,the famous historian on chinese science):

"..It is this Indocentrism that has blinded Indian historians to the possibility of South-East Asian transmission of Chinese rod numerals—complete with decimal place value and empty spaces for null values. The possibility of the South-East Asian transmission of zero from China was argued by Needham in the third volume of his classic Science and Civilization in China. A very similar thesis has been proposed more recently by Lam Lay Yong, a well recognised historian of mathematics from Singapore National University. This rigorously argued and evidence-backed thesis is beginning to find acceptance among professionally trained historians around the world and a place in influential textbooks of the history of mathematics. In India, however, it has met with a deafening silence.

 Absence of place value

Conventional accounts of the Indian origins of zero gloss over two uncomfortable but well established facts, namely, the absence of place value in Indian numerals until around the sixth century of the Common Era, and secondly, that the first physical evidence of zero comes not from India but from Cambodia and other South-East Asian countries that lie between India and China. Let us look at these two facts more carefully and with an open mind..."

(Click the 'entire page' of the following article and search for 'needham' )

:http://www.frontline.in/science-and-technology/hindutvas-science-envy/article9049883.ece