পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড).pdf/২০৫

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বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড

refugee problem into perspective, the estimated cost for the financial year 1971-1972 has now been put at 650 to 700 million dollars. That is, ironically enough, about equal to the amount by which it had been hoped, given luck, to increase development spending in 1971-1972. To use another kind of comparison, the refugee cost is about equal to one third of the 1970-71 military budget.

 Indian's Labor and Rehabilitation Minister. Mr. Khadilkr, said recently that India had had to curtail development programmes because of the cost of paying for the refugees. In fact the spending for the refugees has gone on the budget deficit. The curtailment takes a rather more generalized but equally serious form First of all, the extra funds which central and state finance ministries had hope to dole out this year to development projects are not now going to be forthcoming.

 Secondly, as one official told me; we're determined not to cut anything. But we are reviewing everything to find economies." On the ground this can mean anything from a cut in the books and stationer)' budget of a new agricultural school to a slowdown in rural electrification with a concomitant slow-down in the extension of pumpoperated irrigation works necessary for the spread of “green revolution" wheat and rice. It can mean cuts in the rural unemployment programme, so that many peasants will not get the jobs. And that not only means that there will be so many less new ditches, roads, or bridges but that the already dreadfully low standards of some rural poor will be further depressed.

 Within North-eastern India, the refugees are now on the labour market. That means the depression of local wage rates, and a vast expansion of the already huge ranks of the unemployed, which could be explosive, and, as one West Bengal administrator said “It's not quantifiable, but as long as these people are here, they represent an extra strain."

 The limited number of local administrators have been almost entirely diverted from their normal tasks, and the results of their inevitable neglect of other matters are bound to show sooner or later. Many have hardly opened their local files for four or five months.

 The rich nations have contributed rather less than a third of what will be the 1971-1972 cost of sustaining the refugees. There has been little compensation on the normal aid front. One Indian official put it like this: “of course we can manage. We always have in the past. But what the West has to think about is what does 'managing' mean? It means a slow-down of all the programmes through which India is trying to create a better future for her people. And time is precious here."

 Governments have made contributions in kind-sometimes putting a cash value on them that is to say the least disputable-or they have tied purchase to a particular kind of goods or, worse, still, they have tied the money to purchases in their own countries,

 This is naturally quite infuriating to the Indians. The burden can be eased by making purchases of the necessary food and materials in India. But the quality of aid is a secondary problem. What matters most is the quantity.