The landing ground at Boyra, on the Indian bank of the river Kakotaksha, is like a soupbowl full of sloshy mud, rimmed by a few lean-to shelters and one decrepit brick building. It has become almost a place of pilgrimage for foreign visitors—Kennedy came here, and so have scores of others—for, as the Indian terminal of one of the safest escape routes out of East Bengal, you can always rely on it to show a stream of refugees.
They were still coming across in the rain this week, young men in stripped shirts carrying plastic toilet bags containing valuables and an extra folded shirt ; families, with the children sometimes weirdly cheerful—in contrast to their parents—because they somehow see the trip as a kind of treat ; young Hindu women dressed in Moslem clothes ; sons carrying their aged parents on their backs. Officers of the Indian Border Security Force, in civvies but carrying little swagger sticks supervise the flow.
The refugee menfolk stand in a long queue. waiting for their "border slips." Once you have your border slip, you can set off down the road from Boyra to a camp, where, again after waiting hours in the mud, you and your family are inoculated with a high-speed inoculation gun. Then they give you three days' rations and a list of the camps along the border, with some indication of those which are full and those which may—just may—have vacancies. That is why you get three days' rations—because it can take you three days—or more to find a resting place.
One middle-aged man yesterday staggered from the boat which had brought him across the river with his mother across his shoulders. When he put her down, the old woman began to slowly crumple into the mud, whimpering slightly. The young BSF officer said to me : "The old woman will probably die while they are looking for a camp. We wish we had the transport to drive these people to the camps."
That is what it looks like on the ground, or rather, in the mud. But in air-conditioned offices in Calcutta and New Delhi, this continuing great displacement of suffering humanity has to be translated into budgetary arithmetic. And it is a sobering arithmetic.
The Indian Government has already committed the equivalent of $350 millions for refugee relief until the end of the year, a figure based on a camp population of some six million refugees. Boyra provides an example of why that assumption is likely to be well off the mark, but even on the figure of six million people, India will have Ito put up another $150 millions for the first three months of 1972.
The total Indian expenditure for the first year of the refugees, March to March, will thus be around $500 millions. To put this figure into some kind of perspective, it is about a fifth of the normal annual development expenditure by central and state governments, and is approximately equal to the increase in development spending which it had been hoped would be possible in the financial year 1971-72.
Nobody is suggesting that the spending on refugees will simply be deducted from the development budget. It will go on the deficit, more than doubling it. But, as one senior Ministry of Finance official told me : "The mental horizon changes. We are looking around for savings. Normally when one development project lags, the money is diverted to other projects which are doing better. Now the inclination will be, whenever a project is not using up the funds allotted, to see this as a general budgetary saving."
From the $500 millions which India has spent or will spend on the refugees will be deducted the money and good contributed by foreign countries and agencies. This, however, so far amounts to only about $150 millions, of which $100 millions has been committed to the UN, and $50 millions represents the value of bilateral contributions and the work of foreign voluntary agencies.
Of the sum of $100 millions pledged through the UN, only about half has materialised. The cash contribution total, as against aid in kind, amounts to only $23 millions, and the amount of unattached cash, without limitations on where and how it can be spent, is as low as $5 millions.
The feeling of both sides is that, now the emergency period of refugee relief is over, the operation is in a new phase where the bulk of refugee requirements can be met by purchasing in India. This is true of most foodstuffs besides rice and cooking oil, and of other requirements, like those for medicines, clothing, shelter, materials, and some vehicles.
The quality of aid is not an important problem, however, if one is thinking only in terms of the remaining $50 millions of the international contribution through the UN. It only becomes a problem if it is assumed that there are going to be further major contributions to the burden by the richer countries. And that, of course, is a question.
It is a question which has not been raised in its sharpest form because, for political reasons, the Indian Government is constrained to act and talk as if the refugees are to be on Indian soil for the briefest of periods. The UN and the voluntary agencies are equally limited, in their fund raising and public planning, to the period ending in December this year. When the Indian Government makes its pitch for more international assistance, which it will undoubtedly do within the next few weeks, it will probably do so for a period running no further ahead than March of next year.
If the costs of the refugee operation could genuinely be regarded as a once and for all expenditure of limited duration, Western countries might allow themselves, without too bad a conscience, to contribute only a fifth or a quarter and leave the rest of the burden to India, perhaps promising to make it all up when aid budgets are not as tight as they are now. But it has become obvious that an independent Bangla Desh is not just round the next corner, and there are many in India, including Western diplomats, who believe that a substantial proportion of the Hindu refugees will not want to go back even to an independent East Bengal.
It is not as if ordinary aid to India has increased. Some of the major appropriations have yet to be made by donor countries, but it looks as if the aid total will not be significantly up on that for last year. Thus India is taking on a huge financial burden at a time when there were hopes that her economy was on the point of a real recovery, particularly in the industrial sector.
India herself is hoping, and will no doubt soon be asking, that the world community should pay 60 per cent of the costs of the refugees. For a variety of reasons, not forgetting the old woman crumpling into the mud at Boyra, both the West and the Soviet Union would do well to consider that figure as at least a basis for negotiation.