পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/৬৬৪

বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড This is refugee life al its most constructive. There are schools, weekly singsongs and cleaning operation by groups of volunteers from among the refugees. But, in those districts where camps have been cut off, life could not be more hazardous. Overflowing canals, turbulent rivers and lashing rain have in the past few weeks converted the West Bengal landscape into an angry sea of swirling brown water. The crumbling masonry of provincial towns has given way; streets are inundated; bridges have been wrenched from their supports and flung aside; roads and railway tracks swept away. West Bengal's flood death toll totals many thousands. Communications arc the single most important problem that faces the relief effort. West Bengal's five northern districts-West Dinajpur, Jalpaiguri, Cooch Bihar, Darjeeling and Malda; accounting for nearly 3,500,000 refugees—have been totally cut off by the angrily swelling Ganges at Farakka, 200 miles north of Calcutta. This was also the main route to the three northeastern stales of Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura, which have together received nearly two million refugees. Calcutta is the principal supply base for all these areas and, unless communications are quickly restored, the 400 refugee camps there (out of a total of 940 in five states) will soon run out of stocks of food medicines, clothes and building materials. The desperation of the situation has forced Oxfam-five of whose trucks are stranded by water-to charter an aero plane to airlift essential drugs, but the one company that enjoys a monopoly of this route-flying ramshackle old Dakotas, many of which are relics of World War has callously taken advantage of the crisis to raise its charter rate to Agartala, Tripura's capital. Indian Air Force planes have already made a dozen sorties on missions of mercy to Gauhati but this is not enough. Oxfam's regional director, Julian Francis, says that he expects to spend about £634,000 by the end of this year on East Bengal refugees. But Oxfam is also embarking on a £42,000 relief project for Hoods in Bihar and to keep costs down Francis sent out three vehicles last week, each laden with nine tons, of high-protein food, medicines and clothes on an experimental and circuitous route to avoid the floods. Time is running out. The worst phase of the monsoons may now be over but storage facilities have always been inadequate in the north and north- east and supplies arc running dangerously low. Nearly 230 Japanese trucks given by the United Nations have been lying idle with their distinctive markings in a Calcutta street for the past 20 days because of the condition of the roads. It has become impossible amid such widespread misery to tell the newcomer from the native peasant. Draped in the same grimy rags, both are equally homeless. Where the raised tarmac of a road still winds its way through the Hood waters they have camped on it. huddled in a mass of hungry, rain-sodden humanity along the 40 miles to the town of Bongaon on the Pakistan border. An Indian Roman Catholic priest. Father Joe d'Souza" says that he can now visit only three out of the 17 refugee camps that he was looking after; the others have either been completely submerged or are inaccessible. The Catholic voluntary organisation, Caritas. has promised Father d'Souza some money and he is trying to buy a fleet of country boats to re-establish contact with his uprooted and dispossessed parish. The main relief effort continue in spile of these draw backs and Colonel P.N. Luthra, the Indian officer in charge of operations, claims that relief has emerged from its earlier haphazard work into