Calcutta: Purna Chandra Rai stood motionless outside the 30-bed hospital at the Thakurbari refugee camp, in West Dinajpur. In his arms was his 12-year-old son, emaciated, hardly able to breathe. Malnutrition and dysentery had wrecked his digestive system. "He is my third son," said Purna Chandra. His two other sons had died in the camp from the same ailment.

This case is common. Helpless mothers tearfully pleading with doctors to save their ailing children are a familiar sight in West Bengal refugee camps. The floods have further aggravated the situation in some areas of North Bengal and Nadia by disrupting supplies and corrupting drinking water.

The reason for this chronic malnutrition is quite simple. The government supplies a daily diet of 400 grammes of rice and 100 grammes of pulses a head, plus some vegetables whenever they are available. This diet is totally insufficient for children and nursing mothers unless supplemented by additional protein food. The refugee children, deprived of these proteins, fall an easy prey to diseases like blood dysentery and diarrhoea. No medicine works then; the patient loses the capacity to digest food - even a single spoonful may prove fatal.

But the children suffering from malnutrition will not start dying at once. They die a few at a time, five in one camp, 10 in another; but they die.

According to two Indian doctors appointed by the government to study the problem, more than 100,000 infants and pre-school children may die if urgent steps are not taken in the next few months. This estimate is conservative by comparison with that made by Dr. Scrimshaw, a nutrition expert from Massachusetts Institute of Technology who visited the refugee camps along with Senator Edward Kennedy. His figure put the number of those who face death during the next few months at 300,000.

The Indian team had recommended that nutrition therapy centres should be set up and an emergency relief operation to provide supplementary food launched. The government has gone ahead on both projects, to the tune of Rs30 million (US$4 million).

A co-ordination committee of 12 relief organisations including Caritas India, Oxfam, Save the Children Fund and Catholic Relief Service has been set up under the overall guidance of the Indian Red Cross to start a mass feeding programme. This joint venture, known as operation Life Line, consists of two parts: feeding the undernourished children, and catering for critical cases involving hospitalization.

It has been agreed that the committee will concentrate on the first part, leaving the second group, which requires special nutrition therapy, under government care. The agencies will be dealing with nearly two million children and nursing mothers, for whom 2,000 centres will be opened, each serving 2,000 children with extra food. The health ministry will help set up 500 nutrition therapy centres, each for 230 patients on the brink of death.

But this is still mostly on paper. Some aspects of the venture are yet to be finalised, and experts have not agreed which age group - children under five or in the five to eight group - is most vulnerable.

There is still another argument over what food should be provided under the mass feeding programme. Some experts have suggested that texturised vegetable protein, used successfully in Biafra, is the answer. Dipped in water, it becomes spongy and is said to be quite tasty. Meanwhile, many relief organisations, including Caritas-India, Oxfam, and CASA (Catholic Association for Special Action), continue to distribute protein biscuits and milk among children. They had launched a feeding programme on' their own, though on a modest scale.

In West Dinajpur, which has a large refugee population, Caritas-India is looking after 350,000 refugees of whom nearly 40,000 are children. All of them are getting milk daily, protein biscuits and high-protein porridge made of wheat, milk, sugar and ovaltine. In the Salt Lake camps, which have the largest refugee population and also among the better organised, Caritas is distributing 30,000 lbs of vitaminised bread.

In July, when the refugee population was 6.7 million, it was estimated children under 12 numbered some three million. Now, according to official figures, the refugees number nine million. And still, as the Indian government has bitterly noted, the target for international aid - $400 million - set when India only expected to have to feed five million refugees for six months has been met only halfway.