AGARTALA, India, April 13— Peasants in many areas of East Pakistan are not planting their rice because the daily shooting between the Pakistani Army and the Bengali independence forces has made them afraid to come out in the open.

In West Pakistan, 1,000 miles away across Indian territory, textile mills are turning out cheap cotton‐goods that have no market other than East Pakistan; but cannot be sold there unless the Pakistani Army crush6 the independence movement and ends the war.

These are but marks of the havoc that the three‐week war has created in the economies of both wings of the country, beyond the loss of life in the, East.

Although this correspondent saw no outright starvation in East Pakistan, food stocks in the countryside are low and famine seems a possibility in some areas.

Even in normal times, East Pakistan might be called a hunger area, for it has an annual food‐grain deficit of 2.5 million tons.

No Reports From Delta

With foreign newsmen barred by the Pakistani Government from entering East Pakistan, no reports are available from some of the heavily populated islands in East Pakistan's delta on the Bay of Bengal. Several hundred thousand were killed in the delta in November by a cyclone that also destroyed most of last year's rice crop there.

Approximately two million survivors have been living ever since on relief supplies. The political crisis that erupted early in March and the Army attack on the civilian population after that have halted all shipments of food to the cyclone‐affected area.

Foreign diplomats and others fear that the food problem there could become grave in a few weeks, with the coming of the monsoon rains, which each year cut off some of the islands from the rest of the country for nearly five months.

Beyond that, it is estimated that 100,000 cyclone survivors are still without homes or shelter. In the monsoon, they will face desperate conditions.

Disruptions Compounded

War disruptions are compounding the economic crises. The Pakistani armed forces, composed entirely of West Pakistani troops, are destroying food stocks, tea plantations and jute mills. The resistance troops, adopting guerrilla tactics, are tearing up rail lines, blowing up bridges and demolishing roads to restrict the army's movements and cut its supply routes.

Tea‐estate and jute‐mill managers, mostly foreigners, are abandoning their plantations, leaving them in the hands of Bengali assistants.

There is no money to pay the thousands of tea workers left behind and work has stopped on almost all plantations, most of them in Sylhet district in the northeast. The tea workers are all Hindus and, according to the managers who fled, they have already begun migrating across the border to predominantly Hindu India.

The Pakistani Army has reportedly looted banks and shops.

“Their targets are mostly civilian,” said Col. M.F.G. Osmany, the commander of the resistance forces, at this base in an eastern border area.

“They are trying to terrorize and starve the population.”

There are shortages of salt, lentils, mustard oil for cooking, kerosene for lamps and fuel for machines such as those that run village flour mills.

Rice and fish are the staple foods of the Bengalis—the 75 ‘million people of East Pakistan —but with rice stocks dwindling, they are turning to jackfruit as a new staple. Jackfruit, which can be cooked as a vegetable before it is ripe or eaten as a fruit when it matures, grows plentifully on trees everywhere in East Pakistan, but, it has always been a minor part of the Bengali diet.

With nothing moving through East Pakistan's major port, Chittagong, except for the army's military supplies, the Bengalis for now will have to survive on what they can scratch from their own countryside. After centuries of floods, storms, disease and the deepest poverty, they have become experts at survival.

Though the war has not touched West Pakistan physically, nearly every economic dislocation it has caused in the, East will have an impact in the West.

Jute from the East was the country's largest single export product and foreign‐exchange earner. Most of the foreign earnings were spent in West Pakistan—to pay for the army and to finance big industries and public works.

Exploitation Goes On

This kind of exploitation of East Pakistan, which has been going on since the two parts of the country were carved out of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, was the fuel that fired first the East's drive for equal treatment and regional autonomy and finally the movement for independence.

With the East's jute mills shut, West Pakistan's economy is in difficulty.

East Pakistan has always been the major market for West Pakistani manufactured goods, particularly cotton materials’ for clothing, and now this trade has stopped.

The cotton is of such cheap quality that it has no market anywhere in the world; it was sold in the East at a Government‐fixed inflated price to support the West's textile industry.

With imposition of censorship on all news reports from West Pakistan, it is difficult to tell what stresses the economy there is showing.

How long the Pakistani Government can wage its war against the independence forces in East Pakistan is unsure. The main factors include the following:

How much reserve ammunition the Government has. During Pakistan's brief war with India in 1965, her lack of a large ammunition stockpile was a major factor.

How much airplane and vehicle fuel the Government has, and how much foreign exchange is on hand to buy fuel.

Whether the United States and others in the aid‐Pakistan consortium go so far as to, halt all aid to press the Pakistani Government to end its military offensive in the East. United States economic assistance alone is about 8175‐million a year.

Whether Communist China — Pakistan's closest ally now — agrees to provide everything Pakistan needs to continue the war.

The United States has given an implied warning to Pakistan about withdrawing aid. But Washington's desire seems to be to try to bring about an end to the war without taking any drastic action.