A labyrinth of channels and thousands of little islands for the Ganges- Brahmaputra delta that opens into the Bay of Bengal, east of Calcutta. This watery landscape provides the millions who live there with three things - flood, food and famine - all equally familiar. In much of the area the land is so flat and low that the only barrier encountered by rivers are their own overloads deposited in a previous year, or the levees built by over-zealous villagers. The delta land is seldom more than 1.5 to 2.0 feet above the sea level.

The sea habitually accepts the waters from the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, but on the odd occasions it rebels, turns the tables on the delta, and one tidal wave perhaps 20 or even 50 ft high destroys everything that man had managed to build with his bare hands since the last great wave.

Exposed

This delta land supports 80 per cent of the 70 million people of East Pakistan, making it the world’s highest density area with about 1200 people to a square mile. Mercifully, however, only three to five million people are directly exposed to the danger from the Bay of Bengal. But these people are among the poorest in the world, with a per capita annual income of as little as 200 rupees. (The average per capita income for Pakistan as a whole including the more developed richer West Pakistan, is 418 rupees, or about £30 at the high official exchange rate).

The last tidal wave, sweeping about 15,000 people and 50,000 head of cattle out to sea, struck the same area on May 11, 1965. Most families there own a boat in much the same way as Westerners own a car - boats which capsize and sink easily. As the bodies are washed back on to land, many of the survivors are mopped up by cholera and typhoid.

The rescuers and the Government teams usually arrive too late when there is little for them to do. They find the problems of the area so daunting that they - on past experience - shrug their shoulders and go back to their air- conditioned offices in Dacca or Islamabad - until the next tidal wave. Then the usual fashionable story is heard - “all communications have been disrupted by the cyclones.” All they can do in the meantime is fly in helicopters and aircraft, look down upon the desolation, and perhaps drop food whereas they see any remaining evidence of life. The fact is that these areas have no modern forms of communication to be disrupted. In the best conditions one often has to wait a week to catch the next boat to one of the islands.

Dominant

Geography, however, is not the only or the main problem of the area. Throughout history Bengal has been the marginal land of the empires that have risen and fallen on the Indian mainland. Bengal has always been ruled by a remote authority, and the paradox is that this authority has never been more remote than since independence in 1947. This need not have been necessarily so if local and provincial democratic governments had been allowed to develop, not disrupted by dominant groups led by the Army in West Pakistan.

Examine some of the contradictions. The British introduces jute to East Pakistan, but partition left the jute mills in Calcutta. Pakistan has built huge new jute mills in East Pakistan, but the agricultural price policies pursued by the Government have merely transferred the exploitation of jute growers and peasants to entrepreneurs in Dacca and Chittagong. Much of the relative prosperity of West Pakistan, and particularly of its urban centres, has been built up on the surplus of East Pakistan’s jute-based foreign trade being transferred to pay for industrialisation in the West wing, the annual transfer of resources from East to West is about 250 million rupees. The cumulative loss to the area since 1947, and in particular since the army rule began under Ayub Khan’s hegemony in 1958, is stupendous.

Compared with these resources the cost of flood control measures in East Pakistan is small. The World Bank, which has been studying the problem for some years, has identified 20 multipurpose projects that will largely eliminate the problem at an estimated cost of around $800 millions.

Achieved

Compared with what Pakistan spends on the import of foreign cars (mainly Japanese and German), refrigerators, air-conditioners, and other consumer goods, this bill takes a new perspective. Pakistan has contracted foreign loans of over $5 billions, paying almost 20 per cent of its foreign exchange earnings in interest payments. In any case, no determined Government can be short of internal currency resources. These may not build the kind of dams, barrages and dykes the World Bank proposes, yet a system of dykes based on outward islands to at least soften the blow could be achieved without any external grants. It is failure of will more than of money. But the World Bank cannot raise the 800 million dollars required because death and destruction on this scale is not a political issue. To settle the explosive Indo- Pakistan dispute over the Indus waters, the World Bank and the Western powers managed to make “a billion dollar investment in peace.”

But there is at least some evidence that the present regime is taking the problem more seriously. In every speech that General Yahya Khan has made he has mentioned flood control as a top priority. The only action he has so far announced is: “Under my instructions the Planning Commission have already taken the initiative to mobilise foreign assistance from all friendly countries to finance this programme. I am confident that international community will not fail us in financing this programme which is of such crucial importance to the future of East Pakistan”.

Invited

But the President does not see the urgency of the problem in national terms. Mobilisation of internal resources to solve the problem, or at least make it less hazardous does not seem to be on the regime’s agenda. Yahya Khan added: “we intend to set up a Special Fund for this purpose to which contributions will be invited from friendly countries and international financial institutions and to which Pakistan itself will make a suitable contribution.”

Whether or not the world community responds to Yahya Khan’s appeal remains to be seen. What is certain however is that some more of the remaining hopes of an orderly return to civilian and democratic rule in Pakistan have been swept out to sea.