পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/৩১৬

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বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড
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truck loads of food and supplies a day-which amounts to a daily ration of 10.5 ounces of rice, 3.5 ounces of wheat and 3.5 ounces of vegetables per person. Children also get a pint of milk per day plus a multiple vitamin pill under a supple mentary feeding program to cure the malnutrition that afflicted most of them' when they first crossed the border.

 To be sure, the Salt Lake camp is reputed to be a “show place.” And there, as in the other. 150 camps that foreign reporters are permitted to visit, it is not the least bit uncommon for ten families, or about 50 people, to huddle under a single tent measuring 50 by 24 feet. Babies are scattered all over the place, crying and vomiting. and the overpowering stench of human waste pervades the camp from one end to the other. The conditions seem intolerable, but the refugees endure because, unbelievable as it may seem, many of them never even had it this “good” in the Bengali villages whence they came. At most camps, all a refugee has to do is to look over to an adjoining Indian village, sometimes only 300 yards away, lo see that, thanks to the relief program, he usually gets more to eat and receives better medical care than does the local Indian population.

Resentment

 Understandably, the impression that the refugees are getting favored treatment from the Indian Government has bred resentment among the locals. When a human tidal wave of 200,(X)0 East Bengali refugees suddenly inundated the frontier village of Balat in India's Meghalaya state, for example, Luthra's relief workers hastily organized a 400-bed hospital and dispatched a mobile X-ray unit, an electrical generator and surgical instruments there. Balat's 3,000 permanent inhabitants, most of whom had never even seen a hospital before, marveled at the attention showered on the newcomers and naturally enough, began asking why they were not treated at the new hospitals too. Similarly in Calcutta, where no fewer than 500,000 of the teeming city's 8 million people are jobless and where 70 per cent of the families subsist on about $ 12 a month, there are bitter complaints that refugees have been offering their services for 1 Rupee a day instead the going daily wage of 3 Rupees for unskilled laborers. Only stern measures by the authoritics have thus far prevented wholesale rioting between Calcutta's slum dwellers and the equally impoverished refugees in their desperate scramble for any son of paying jobs.

 These social strains and the staggering financial burden of refugee relief seem more then India can possibly bear. Estimates indicate that the program will have cost $ 900 million by next March, of which only S 250 million has been offset by donations and pledges from abroad. Fully 16-per cent of India's current national budget is now caten up in refugee relief, and the country's food-stocks, painstakingly built up over two good crop years as a cushion against leaner times, are fast dwindling. Special taxes have been levied, and the government has cut back drastically on all other spending areas, even to the extent of shelving of long planned development programs. “We cannot even reckon how much the refugees will cost us in 72 an Indian official told Newsweek's Arnaud de Borchgrave. “because the prospect is too horrendous to contemplate."