At the moment the Pakistan army has absolute priority and lorry loads of grain can be kept waiting at one of the many ferries for hours. It is only fair to add that every terrorist act of the Mukti Fouj causes additional dislocation and suffering for the Bengalis.
Dramatic measures such as air lifts or air drops of food may be essential in an urgent action to save life when the famine begins towards the end of this year but this is not a realistic manner to feed some fifty to seventy million people.
Unhappily too many families are split and the man who is forced to keep his shop open in Dacca or Chittagong has frequently sent his wife and children off to relations in the country little realizing the greater danger there. Indeed it is estimated that the urban population has been reduced by more than a half.
But this is not a question of figures. I recall in a flooded area only ten miles away from Dacca seeing a queue of half naked people waiting outside a reed hut to obtain clothes and a ticket for a daily rice ration from a Catholic priest. I talked with one woman who had five small hungry children. She told me her husband had been killed earlier in the fighting. Her Basha-reed home-had been suddenly burnt by the Pakistan soldiers. She only had time to pick up the sleeping children before the flames enveloped their home. That is why she had no clothes, nothing. Her story could be repeated thousands of times.
There was no Pakistan Government assistance or help available even though a railway line was functioning within a mile of this spot and had it not been for the priest, the widow and her five children would have died.
Urgent relief is also required by the thirty thousand people who escaped from East Pakistan over the frontier into Burma. No foreign visitors have been allowed to visit them but Burmese doctors told me their plight was appalling.
MARTIN WOOLLACOTT
The price of disaster
(Martin Woollacott of the Guardian on Indiana's dilemma. “By helping the refugees now she will have to cut development and pay the price in future deaths of her own children.”)
It would be wrong to paint a picture of budgetary panic in New Delhi, of an administration near collapse in West Bengal, or of new development programmes cancelled. But the money being spent by India will at least delay development and the Indian people will eventually pay a price in lives for their aid to the refugees, unless the West-and the Soviet Union-pays now. India to her credit has not tried to pretend that the cost of looking after the refugees from Hast Bengal has pushed the country to the verge of bankruptcy. If India were to get into serious difficulties directly attributable to the refugees, or was able to point to the actual abandonment of key development projects, it would be a lot easier to get funds.
India has a long history of successfully coping with disasters, even when there seemed all too little room for extra spending, particularly unproductive spending. To put the
