Boston Globe

BARASAT, INDIA.-The streets of this little country town are choked with refugees from East Pakistan. A tiny child, half dead from cholera, lies uncared for on the village green. Vultures work over the body of another child in a nearby ditch.

Barasat is only 5 miles from Calcutta and relief planes from half a dozen nations fly low overhead.

Their cargoes of medical supplies may temporarily have averted a mammoth disaster but the tragedy goes on and Barasat is living evidence of its magnitude.

West Bengal Health Minister Jainal Abedin announced yesterday that the cholera epidemic in the Maine-sized state has been brought under control.

But in Barasat's government hospital, 131 cholera patients lie on the stone floors in revolting filth and the doctor in charge reports he still is short of live- saving saline fluid .

Barasat suffocates under the refugee influx. Normally it is a town of 40,000 people. Now it has a population of more than 300,000.

Besides the cholera, the East Pakistani refugees are facing yet another obstacle to survival-a shortage of tents to protect them from the summer monsoon.

Foreign relief sources said yesterday that 300,000 tents were needed urgently to provide shelter to 1.5 million refugees who cannot be accommodated in already overcrowded relief camps.

"The tents are needed with greater urgency than medicines, which are now arriving," said one foreign official helping coordinate the international relief operations in New Delhi.

A senior official of the Indian Rehabilitation Ministry said there were now 5.2 million refugees in India, and added they were still coming across the border at a rate of between 50,000 and 100,000 daily.

"We originally thought there would be a maximum of two million refugees, then three million," he said in an interview. "Now we don't know when they will stop coming."

"There are so many of them that it is impossible to get them into organized camps," said a police official in Barasat.

"They just move into property, and there is nothing we can do.

"Of course, the local people are frightened. They are frightened of the spread of disease, and they are frightened that if the refugees continue to go hungry, there may be violence."

An Indian doctor told how scores of East Pakistanis camped on the porch of a neighbor's home. They were weak from lack of food, filthy and ridden with vermin.

Two days later, it was his neighbor's two children who came down with cholera. One of them died.

"Such incidents Inevitably fuel local resentment," he said.

Units of the paramilitary central police reserve were brought in this week to clear refugees out of several Barasat homes and from a local mosque.

Many refugees in Barasat quit their homes in East Pakistan two months ago. Since then they have been living rough and with little food. They are exhausted and have little resistance to disease.

Thousands of refugees lined up yesterday for ration cards entitling them to a government handout of rice. They became restless when the laborious form-filing of local officials caused long delays. So the officials walked off, leaving most of them without cards.

To survive, most refugees have sold what few valuables they were able to bring with them from East Pakistan. Now they have been told they no longer can change Pakistani money into Indian,

"We have no ration cards and nothing left to sell," said Rathkania Mandal. "Even our cooking pots have been sold."

Three generations of Mandal's family fled with him from the East Bengal city of Khulna.

They have had nothing to eat for three days . Like thousands of others, he squats listlessly in the muddy street. Others have thrown up makeshift homes on the stone porches of shops.

Some have erected pathetic shelters of old rags in a vain attempt to keep out monsoon rains, yet to reach their torrential peak. The apathy of exhaustion and hopelessness prevents many from doing even that.

An abandoned child lay on the green In the center of Barasat It was suffering from cholera and had lapsed into a coma. No one knew where its parents were, and no one bothered to get it to a hospital.

Death is a commonplace in Barasat, and preservation of one's own family comes first.

Overcrowding In refugee camps was expected to be eased somewhat by an American airlift of East Pakistanis to less crowded areas in northeastern Assam State.

A US Air Force C130 will make a test flight to two airfields in the area today to determine whether the fields can handle the four-engine cargo planes, a US Embassy spokesman said.

If the report is favorable, as expected, three more planes will fly out to India this weekend from Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina, he said.