Along the roadsides lie the bodies left by those too frightened of the disease themselves to take the time for burial.

Vultures, dogs and crows fight. Skeltons already picked clean bleach in the sun. A few bodies have been buried in shallow graves, but the vultures have torn the graves open.

The roads leading from the border are a trail of clothes and bones. A body floats in a marsh or stream. The stench is acrid and villagers cover their faces as they hurry past.

Mass graves in some areas

In some towns, attempts have been made to bury the bodies in mass graves. Here in Karimpur, which is 120 miles north of Calcutta by road, five relief workers buried several hundred in a 24-hour period. But even at these sites, packs of stray dogs dig in the earth.

In many ways, the scene is a repetition of the horror of the cyclone that killed hundreds of thousands in the Delta area of East Pakistan last November-leaving bodies for days in marshes, streams and bays.

The tiny, jammed health center at Karimpur-it has 20 beds and over 100 cholera patients-is typical of the overworked health stations along the border. The sounds of the epidemic-coughing, vomiting, groaning and weeping- echo through the small brick building and across the lawn, also crowded with victims. Shatish Matabbar-the father of the infant who had gone on nursing after his mother died-stood on the porch in tattered clothes, sobbing out his tale.

"No words can describe what has happened to me," the 45-year-old rice farmer wailed. "My wife is dead. Three of my children are dead. What else can happen?" Two children survive

The infant and an 8-year-old have survived, although the older almost died of cholera. He sat on the floor near his father-naked, staring blankly, underfed. The family came to India a month ago from their farm in the Faridpur district of East Pakistan.

Why had he left East Pakistan? a visitor asked.

"Why, you ask?" he said, crying again. "Because the Pakistani soldiers burned down my house."

In the last day or two, the death rate in some areas declined a little. This is apparently because foreign medical and relief supplies have begun arriving in sufficient quantities-saline solution to treat the victims and syringes for mass inoculations. Hundreds of thousands have been vaccinated.

But doctors are reluctant to say that the epidemic will be under control soon. For one thing, though India's army medical corps has been called in, medical facilities and personnel are inadequate.

The epidemic is apparently much worse in East Pakistan than in India. Medical facilities in East Pakistan, even in normal times, are meager. In an average year, 150,000 die there of cholera, most of them because they never get any treatment. In a bad year, the toll sometimes runs as high as 300,000.

Dr. M. A. Majid, the chief medical officer of the Nadia district, the worst-hit area, said today that he expected the death rate to start climbing again. The cholera vaccine, he said, gives only 30 percent to 90 percent protection.

The weakened condition of the refugees helps explain the virulence of the epidemic. Many are on the verge of death when they arrive.

In addition, living conditions are little short of desperate. Though the Indian Government has marshaled all available resources to provide shelter and food, it is impossible to keep up with the influx.

Many live in the open

Relief camps even just tents made by throwing tarpaulins over bamboo frames-cannot be erected fast enough. It is estimated that 3.5 million refugees are either living in the open or in crude thatch leantos of their own making. The monsoon rains have arrived and many refugee towns are mudholes.

There are water shortages and sanitation facilities have virtually broken down. The main streets of border towns are avenues of garbage and flies.

Food lines stretch for hundreds of yards and it sometimes takes hours for a refugee to get his rations.

More refugees are moving toward Calcutta as the other camps become choked. New camps are springing up on the edges of the city-just past the airport and in the Salt Lake area.

About 50,000 to 60,000 refugees have entered the fringes of the city, and at kast 60 deaths have been recorded in this group.

A few thousand refugees have moved into the heart of Calcutta and are camping in the Sealdah Railway Station.

Indian officials are worried that the refugee epidemic may spread to the people of Calcutta-an overcrowded, tense city of eight million that has its own fairly serious cholera problem.

[From the New York Times, June 7, 1971]

MEASURING THE TRAGEDY

(By Anthony Lewis)

LONDON, June 6-Imagine the entire population of New Jersey, seven million people, fleeing the state and taking refuge in New York City and the counties nearby. That thought gives some idea of the dimensions of what is happening now in East Pakistan-except that the refugees are much poorer and the area of India into which they are fleeing is infinitely more desperate than New York.

British sources estimate that between four and five million East Pakistanis have crossed into India and that 100,000 more are leaving every day. Before long the total could be seven or eight million.

The refugees are in a country that already has difficulty feeding itself, one afflicted by overpopulation and unemployment. There are no jobs for the refugees, and there is no farm land. They are starting to filter into Calcutta, a city where one million people regularly sleep on the pavement and more millions have no running water or sewage systems.

Public opinion in the West has certainly been slow to react; only now is one beginning to feel a sense of urgency in the calls for action from relief agencies and charities. Yet the root elements in the tragedy, the death and destruction in East Pakistan, have been known for many weeks.

Civil and communal war has killed many thousands of civilians. No one will ever know exactly how many, but disinterested observers have put the figure as high as several hundred thousand.

People have killed each other because of animosities of race, politics and religion; no community is entirely free of guilt. But the principal agent of death and hatred has been the Pakistani Army. And its killing has been selective: according to reliable reports from inside East Pakistan, the army's particular targets have been intellectuals and leaders of opinion-doctors, professors, students, writers.

The economy of East Pakistan has been hard hit. The planting cycle for food grains is disturbed. The transportation system, already badly hurt by the flood disaster last fall, has been crippled. Many boats are sunk. The main railway line will take six months to repair, assuming uninterrupted peace.

The human and economic dislocation now threatens to lead to a terrible famine. The Financial Times of London, which is not given to exaggeration, has published an estimate that up to four million people in East Pakistan may die in the coming months unless emergency relief and reconstruction measures are undertaken. What can Western countries do to help East Pakistan out of this disaster? As has so often been the case, notoriously in the Nigerian civil war, humanitarian instincts are complicated by politics.

Western governments must naturally want to give assistance in a politically helpful way-one that will hopefully calm the hatreds in East Pakistan, restore the society, open the way for refugees to return. But that surely means an external presence in the area, the handling of relief by someone other than the Pakistani Army-a program not likely to please President Yahya Khan.

The United States and other concerned countries have not put pressure on Yahya Khan publicly. But there are indications that they have been using privately their leverage as his main sources of central economic aid. Reports suggest that Yahya Khan will accept some kind of United Nations presence in East Pakistan.

But the West may find its greater task, its greater responsibility, lies in the long run in India. For in a sense this may become more an Indian than a Pakistani crisis.

The immediate challenge to India is to feed the refugees, protect them from the coming monsoon and prevent epidemic such as the cholera now spreading in the refugee camps. The huge economic cost of these needs can be met in part from outside, but the social and political costs will be borne by India.

Even without the refugees, Calcutta and that whole area of India has been politically troubled, driven by left-wing factions and violence. The refugees must add appalling strains to an impoverished and tense society. Mrs. Indira Gandhi,

who at best faced a profound task in giving India any hope of progress in the next few years, must now divert much of her energy and her Government's to the refugee problem. She must worry also about an extremist-led guerrilla movement developing across the border in East Pakistan if the military occupation continues. In these circumstances, not only conscience but political wisdom commends Western help and support for Mrs. Gandhi. The Indians may often be trying to the West, but Mrs. Gandhi's Government is the best hope for stability in South Asia.

[From the Washington Star, June 9, 1971]

UNITED STATES PLANS MORE AID FOR REFUGEES IN INDIA

The U.S. Government is adding $15 million to the crash program for aid to the estimated 4.5 million East Pakistani refugees now in India.

Frank L. Kellogg, the State Department official in charge of the American effort, said yesterday that $10 million in food and $5 million in cash for medicine and equipment would be channeled to India, mainly through the United Nations High Commissioner for refugees.

The United States has already committed $2.5 million of an international total which before the latest American contribution reached $26 million. The U.S. contribution will go through an airlift which, if the advance trials now in process work out, will begin early next week with three C-130 military transports. Kellogg said the highest priority is being given to collecting one million doses of anticholera vaccine to combat an epidemic which has broken out in the West Bengal state where most of the refugees are centered.

According to Kellogg, refugees are still coming into India from East Pakistan at a rate of 50,000 to 100,000 a day. According to World Health Organization figures, 10,000 in West Bengal have been hospitalized with cholera and 3,000 have already died.

Britain has already sent one million doses of anti-cholera vaccine. But given the number of refugees in the area, and the poor sanitary conditions there, officials here are worried that enough vaccine exists to stop the epidemic.

[From the Washington Star, June 9, 1971]

PAKISTANIS, NEAR PANIC, DUMPING PAPER MONEY

(By Malcolm W. Browne)

New York Times News Service

KARACHI.-Pakistan citizens, close to panic tried to jam into banks yesterday to trade huge amounts of paper currency which are suddenly without value by government decree.

The decree Monday night demonetized all 500 rupee and 100 rupee notes, respectively worth $106.25 and $21.25 at the legal exchange rate. These two types of bills represent approximately 60 percent of Pakistan's circulating currency. According to the government, militant Bengali separatists who briefly controlled the administration of East Pakistan in March and April left the banks of East Pakistan empty when the army reoccupied the province. The amount of money that disappeared represented about one-tenth of the nation's circulating currency.

Taken to India

The government is seeking to undercut the economic resources of Bengali separatists who are believed by the government to have taken a large part of the East Pakistani currency into clandestine camps in India.

The demonetization measure also is aimed at crippling the vast currency black market that has developed as the result of the disparity between the legal exchange rate of the rupee and the rupee's real value in international markets. The differences between these rates is nearly three to one.

Customs inspection at all ports of entry into East and West Pakistan were instructed today to conduct rigorous searches of all arriving passengers who might be bringing Pakistani currency into the country, expecially from neighboring Afghanistan and India and from Hong Kong.

Given receipts only

As citizens brought their 500 and 100 rupee notes to banks, they are given merely bank receipts.

There was no indication when currency would be given to citizens. Some bankers speculated it might take a month or more.

Serial numbers of all bills are being checked against a list of bills taken from the East Pakistani banks. Anyone seeking to exchange such a bill is likely to be arrested.

The government, which is facing an economic crisis and the probability of having to default on foreign debt obligations, stands to gain as estimated $200 million as the result of demonetization.

[From the Washington Star, June 8, 1971]

INDIA POLICE TRY TO HALT RIVER CHOLERA BURIALS

KRISHNAGAR, INDIA.-India's West Bengal State is short of police because so many are guarding the rivers to keep the bodies of cholera victims from being thrown in.

According to conservative official estimates, the week-old epidemic among refugees from East Pakistan has taken at least 4,000 lives, half in the Nadia district surrounding Krishnagar.

The 200,000 residents of Krishnagar, 60 miles northeast of Calcutta, are tense. Rumors spread daily that Pakistani agents from across the border 20 miles away are emptying bottles of cholera germs into the local water supplies to make the epidemic spread faster.

Moslem fatally beaten

A crowd of 500 persons beat a Moslem to death yesterday at the Krishnagar railway station after a report that he had emptied a small bottle into a roadside well.

D. K. Ghosh, the district magistrate of Krishnagar, said the rivers are being polluted but by the bodies of cholera victims thrown in by relatives for quick burial.

He said that so many police were now deployed to guard the rivers against this that there is a shortage of police to enforce law and order. With the state's population increased by at least 41⁄2 million refugees from East Pakistan and with hundreds of thousands more coming across the frontiers each week, the West Bengal government asked other states to lend it at least 20 battalions of police. Normally cremated

Most of the cholera victims have been Hindus, who normally are cremated. But a shortage of firewood and fuel makes the traditional rituals impossible. The district magistrate said he had ordered mass burial for at least 1,600 persons. Hindus and Moslems have been buried together in three mass graves in the Nadia district.

The biggest is at Badadurpur, in a government forest seven miles from Krishnagar, where 511 bodies have been buried in a pit.

Ghosh estimated that by last Sunday, 1,079 persons had died of cholera in hospitals in the Nadia district and an equal number had perished along the roads and in villages.

About 75 new victims are admitted to hospitals each day, but with 4,800 cholera patients already under treatment, there is a shortage of hospital space. Cholera ward flooded

At one Krishnagar hospital, a special cholera ward was built of tarpaulin and bamboo outside the main building. When the afternoon monsoon rains came yesterday, all the beds were flooded.

There also is a shortage of saline water-cholera cases need at least eight quarts a day for three days-and of cholera vaccine.

Ghosh said he needs more medical personnel as well, that about 1,000 government employees are caring for approximately 500,000 refugees in the district. "Normal administrative work in the entire district has been collapsing," he added. "More than 1,000 officials working round the clock attending to refugees get no time to do office work."

The inoculation drive got a boost yesterday with the arrival of two jet inoculation guns sent from London by the Oxfam Group. Each can give 700 inoculations an hour.

To the Editor:

[From the New York Times, May 2, 1971]

BENGAL: A THREAT OF FAMINE

The exclusion of the foreign press and observers from East Pakistan has meant the loss of vital information on the course of events there and will deprive us of the dramatic facts that rouse individuals and governments to action. But there is enough conclusive evidence from past and recent history to predict the result of the present conflict on the food position of the province.

The food grains that sustain a large part of the Bengali population come from abroad. Their distribution depends on the effective functioning of the port of Chittagong and on internal transportation and administrative services.

East Pakistan, with a population of more than seventy million, expected 2.5 million tons of imported food grains this year. That is about one-sixth of the total food requirements for the province, enough to feed twelve million people. However, a far greater number is actually affected by an interruption in the steady flow of food. For the 50 per cent of the population living barely at subsistence level, these supplies maintain the balance between life and death.

Bengal has always been extremely susceptible to famine. The last such disaster occurred in 1943 when food expected from Burma did not arrive because of the Japanese occupation of that country. At that time military demands on the Indian transportation system prevented the timely distribution of the food that was available. The food deficit that year was 6 percent; this year it is 16 per cent. Deaths in 1943 numbered 1.5 million, and the famine left social problems from which Bengal has yet to recover fully.

A crisis was imminent in 1965 when the Indo-Pakistani war stopped imports. It was avoided when the great powers used their influence to bring that conflict to a speedy close. Recovery was aided by normal internal supply activities, which had been unaffected by the war.

Today, in contrast, not only has the import of food been cut off, but the internal administrative and transport services have ceased to function normally. In addition, military action at planting time will reduce the coming harvest.

The regular import of food has been interrupted since February. Even if the conflict were to end today, the months required to return the system to normal would probably exceed the time during which the food reserves could sustain the population. The factors that determine mass famine are irreversible after a certain point.

When the first stories and photographs of starving families are published, it will be too late to protect thousands of others. International action, immediate and strong, is perhaps the only defense the people of East Bengal now have. DANIEL C. DUNHAM.

NEW YORK, April 20, 1971.

[From the Washington Star, May 19, 1971]

READY TO FIGHT, MRS. GANDHI TELLS PAKISTAN

NEW DELHI.-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi warned Pakistan yesterday that India, whose eastern frontier regions have been inundated with 2.8 million refugees from the civil war in East Pakistan, “is fully prepared to fight if the situation is forced on us."

It was Mrs. Gandhi's strongest warning yet to the Pakistan federal government to stop its eight-week offensive against Bengali secessionists in East Pakistan. "Unending exodus"

Simultaneously, Indian ambassadors were reported to have alerted Great Britain and France that India may be forced to act in its national interest in the face of the "unending exodus of refugees from East Bengal."

India already has appealed for international help in handling the Bengali refugees. A United Nations panel that toured the refugee camps reported Monday that India has a "monumental" problem that may last for another three to six

months.

Mrs. Gandhi said in a speech yesterday at the Himalayan hill station of Ranikhet, in Uttar Pradesh State, that the refugees have created "a major problem which will severely affect the nation's economic, social and political life."

She said if Pakistan's claim that East Pakistan has returned to normal is really so, then it should invite the refugees back to their homes.