Big planes ready to move refugees

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32633, 15 June 1971, Page 14

Big planes ready to move refugees

(N.Z .P. A.-Reuter—Copyright)

CALCUTTA, June 14.

Giant Soviet and American transport planes are being made ready to join in a race against the clock to move refugees from congested border areas to avert an outbreak of pneumonia.

Already special trains have carried to a desolate area in central India about 20,000 of the 6,500,000 refugees who have fled East Pakistan into the Indian states of West Bengal and Assam and the centrally administered territories of Tripura and Meghalaya.

The pneumonia threat provides a new headache for harried officials just as they appear to have contained the cholera epidemic which already is estimated to have killed more than 5000 of the It is feared that the pneumonia will intensify as the monsoon sets in further. It has already broken in West

Bengal and each time there is a shower the low-lying refugee camp areas on the border turn into swamps. Most of the refugees are already weakened and emaciated from their trek into India and, with only scanty clothing, have little resistance to pneumonia. 40 a day

Doctors at a refugee camp on the outskirts of Calcutta reported at the week-end that they were treating up to 40 cases of pneumonia a day and number of people were dying. Hopes of moving out enough refugees from this and other camps before the situation gets worse is pinned on the special trains running daily and the American and Soviet planes. Three big Soviet Antonov transport aircraft are due at Dum Dum airport, Calcutta, tonight to start ferrying refugees 550' miles to the south-west to the remote Mana area of Madhya Pradesh.

The Soviet planes will initially carry refugees from the Sakhara camp beside the airport and from the Salt Lake camp within the city limits.

On Wednesday, four American Hercules transport aircraft will begin ferrying refugees from Tripura territory to Gauhati in Assam. At least 18 trains, each carrying more than 1000 refugees, have left for Mana in the last week.

Three trains carrying between them nearly 4000 refugees have set out from Hasnabad on the border with East Pakistan and about 15 trains with about 1000 East Pakistanis each have left Barasat, 15 miles from Calcutta, since June 7. Thousands of refugees, illclad and many shivering and coughing, sat and lay huddled on the platforms at Hasnabad and Barasat waiting to be moved out. Many of them do not want to go to Mana, a reclaimed forest land area originally cleared to resettle the hordes of refugees who came into India at the time of the subcontinent’s partition. “There is no other way,” said a Hasnabad refugee camp official. “We are dispatching them to Mana because there is no question of shelter here.”