Pakistan's Eastern region, seized by India yesterday support of Bengali secession, is one of the world's most populous, and least prosperous, areas, a vast, humid delta whose more than 70 million inhabitants have a per capita income of only $77 a year.

Its people are Bengalis, a cohesive ethnic group linked more closely to their neighbors in the adjoining Indian state of Bengal than to the people of West Pakistan.

The region is all but surrounded on three sides by India — it also borders Burma along a part of its eastern boundary. On the fourth side is the Bay of Bengal.

It is in the bay that the violent storms that strike between June and November are born. Devastation of the low‐lying countryside is routine, but in November, 1970, cyclone of more than usual ferocity struck. The high winds and tidal waves killed between 250,000 and 500,000 people.

The country is almost totally agricultural. Some tea grown in the mountainous northeast, but rice—about million tons annually —is the most imporant crop and the staple food. The plain of the delta, threaded by the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers and their tributaries, has average rainfall of 82 inches, twice that of New York.

More than 80 per cent of the country's population work in agriculture and about 80 per cent are illiterate. Only 200,000 or 300,000 are employed by the area's sparse industry —about 1,000 plants including 22 textile mills, 18 match factories and a fertilizer factory. Jute, the raw material of twine and sacking, is an important export.

The largest city is Dacca, with a population estimated at a million it is an old city on which new construction was superimposed hurriedly after partition in 1947, when it became the capital of East Pakistan.

The present population of the region is uncertain. In 1970 it was estimated at 72 million, but since then man‐made violence has cost uncounted thousands of lives, both directly and by its accompanying scourges of starvation and disease, particularly cholera. The number of refugees who fled to India has been estimated at 10 million, and it is not known how many of these survive, or how many will choose to return.